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I don't quite see the benefit of using make for arbitrary workflows (opposed to building software) over using plain old shell scripts. But it sure isn't that m

by roeme 13y ago

I don't quite see the benefit of using make for arbitrary workflows (opposed to building software) over using plain old shell scripts. But it sure isn't that much more complex nor requires a lot more of your system, so I'd say it's more a matter of preference.

sheetjs 13y ago
Make has more natural built-in dependency management. To write your workflow purely in shell scripts, you will invariably use lots of tests. Also note that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. You can write Makefiles that call shell scripts (and shell scripts that call make)
- epistasis 13y ago
  I use a ton of inline shell in make for data munging. I often put SHELL=/bin/bash at the top of the Makefile when I use bashisms to construct complex pipelines. And once, in a fit of mad genius, I made a particularly complex and useful Makefile executable by putting #!/usr/bin/make -f at the top. (It was a bad idea, obviously, and I won't be doing that again.) For large file based datasets, the shell is just a REPL.
camus2 13y ago
how to you track directory and file changes with shell scripts?
- sparkie 13y ago
  Use inotifywait
to3m 13y ago
I've found these things to make Make useful for shell scripting: - straightforward and obvious support for multiple named entry points - by default, process terminates when a command returns a non-0 exit code - often-adequate (though still crappy, especially for paths with spaces) set of built-in string processing functions - scripts often somewhat portable between Unix-style shells and Windows (I suppose there may be Unix-style shells available for Windows, but I've never found a low-dependency one that actually works. So combined with the first three advantages I've stuck with make.) I've actually found Make much better as a shell script replacement than it is for its stated purpose of building software :)
gyepi 13y ago
The advantage of make, or any other decent build tool, is the dependency management; what depends on what, what's changed, what needs to be (re)built, what order to do all this. In the absence of all that, everything gets rebuilt all the time. Not a big deal for small projects but an absolute killer as projects get larger.
apw 13y ago
If you can express your workflow as a set of dependencies (granted, not all workflows are easily expressed this way), make gives you parallel and incremental computation "for free". Imagine that you needed to download a tar archive, unpack it, then run several simulations followed by regressions followed by figure plotting on the data. You could write a shell script to do this, but it would be hard to make the shell script simulate the capabilities of `make -j', and you'd have to do a lot of timestamping and file existence checking to simulate the incremental computation capabilities of make.

by roeme 13y ago

sheetjs 13y ago

Make has more natural built-in dependency management. To write your workflow purely in shell scripts, you will invariably use lots of tests. Also note that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. You can write Makefiles that call shell scripts (and shell scripts that call make)

epistasis 13y ago
I use a ton of inline shell in make for data munging. I often put SHELL=/bin/bash at the top of the Makefile when I use bashisms to construct complex pipelines. And once, in a fit of mad genius, I made a particularly complex and useful Makefile executable by putting #!/usr/bin/make -f at the top. (It was a bad idea, obviously, and I won't be doing that again.) For large file based datasets, the shell is just a REPL.

camus2 13y ago

how to you track directory and file changes with shell scripts?

sparkie 13y ago
Use inotifywait

to3m 13y ago

I've found these things to make Make useful for shell scripting: - straightforward and obvious support for multiple named entry points - by default, process terminates when a command returns a non-0 exit code - often-adequate (though still crappy, especially for paths with spaces) set of built-in string processing functions - scripts often somewhat portable between Unix-style shells and Windows (I suppose there may be Unix-style shells available for Windows, but I've never found a low-dependency one that actually works. So combined with the first three advantages I've stuck with make.) I've actually found Make much better as a shell script replacement than it is for its stated purpose of building software :)

gyepi 13y ago

The advantage of make, or any other decent build tool, is the dependency management; what depends on what, what's changed, what needs to be (re)built, what order to do all this. In the absence of all that, everything gets rebuilt all the time. Not a big deal for small projects but an absolute killer as projects get larger.

apw 13y ago

If you can express your workflow as a set of dependencies (granted, not all workflows are easily expressed this way), make gives you parallel and incremental computation "for free". Imagine that you needed to download a tar archive, unpack it, then run several simulations followed by regressions followed by figure plotting on the data. You could write a shell script to do this, but it would be hard to make the shell script simulate the capabilities of `make -j', and you'd have to do a lot of timestamping and file existence checking to simulate the incremental computation capabilities of make.