How can I automatically create (and remove) a temp directory in a Makefile?

Is it possible to have make create a temp directory before it executes the first target? Maybe using some hack, some additional target etc.?

All commands in the Makefile would be able to refer to the automatically created directory as $TMPDIR, and the directory would be automatically removed when the make command ends.

From stackoverflow

• With GNU make, at least,

  TMPDIR := $(shell mktemp -d)
  

  will get you your temporary directory. I can't come up with a good way to clean it up at the end, other than the obvious rmdir "$(TMPDIR)" as part of the all target.

  Josh Kelley : If all targets are up to date, then evaluating `TMPDIR` will create the directory, and `all`'s rules will never be executed to delete it.

  derobert : @Josh Kelley: .PHONY will take care of that.

  Josh Kelley : You're right, sorry.

• I seem to recall being able to call make recursively, something along the lines of:

  toplevel:
      -mkdir $(TEMPDIR)
      $(MAKE) $(MLAGS) all
      -rm -rf $(TEMPDIR)
  
  all: ... rest of stuff.
  

  I've done similar tricks for making in subdirectories:

  all:
      @for i in $(SUBDIRS); do \
          echo "make all in $$i..."; \
          (cd $$i; $(MAKE) $(MLAGS) all); \
      done
  

  Just checked it and this works fine:

  $ cat Makefile
  all:
      -mkdir tempdir
      -echo hello >tempdir/hello
      -echo goodbye >tempdir/goodbye
      $(MAKE) $(MFLAGS) old_all
      -rm -rf tempdir
  
  old_all:
      ls -al tempdir
  
  $ make all
  mkdir tempdir
  echo hello >tempdir/hello
  echo goodbye >tempdir/goodbye
  make  old_all
  make[1]: Entering directory '/home/pax'
  ls -al tempdir
  total 2
  drwxr-xr-x+ 2 allachan None 0 Feb 26 15:00 .
  drwxrwxrwx+ 4 allachan None 0 Feb 26 15:00 ..
  -rw-r--r--  1 allachan None 8 Feb 26 15:00 goodbye
  -rw-r--r--  1 allachan None 6 Feb 26 15:00 hello
  make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/pax'
  rm -rf tempdir
  
  $ ls -al tempdir
  ls: cannot access tempdir: No such file or directory
  

  : That works, but of course only if the user says 'make' without specifying a target. So 'make all' won't work etc.

  paxdiablo : I expect the user to know what they're doing :-) so they would use "make" or "make toplevel". In any case, you can change "all" to "old_all" and "toplevel" to "all" if you want that behavior.

  paxdiablo : Updated so that you can "make all" which is also the default rule.

• make doesn't support this directly, and trying to do it manually from the makefile is just too difficult, since you need to delete the directory regardless of which rule is run, even if a rule fails, and even if no rules are invoked (because the target is up to date).

  The best solution that I've found is to wrap the Makefile in a shell script make.sh:

  #!/bin/bash
  
  TEMPDIR=$(mktemp -d -t) || exit 1
  export TEMPDIR
  
  trap "rm -rf $TEMPDIR" 0
  
  make $@
  

  Then, in your Makefile, add a rule to verify that TEMPDIR was set:

  ifeq ($(TEMPDIR),)
  $(error TEMPDIR environment variable not defined (try running from make.sh))
  endif
  

  Then just run make.sh instead of make.