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Juan Simón
Asked: 2011-01-21 04:07:21 +0800 CST

"$MAKEOPTS" ignored, why?

  • 772

I have defined 

export MAKEOPTS="-j4"

in my ~/.profile file.

But when I do a compilation with make, this option is ignored.
I've consulted the GNU Make manual but it says nothing about this variable. Is it standard or only it works in certain distros?

environment-variables

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer
    export MAKE="make -j4"

    This will help invoking child make processes, but I'm afraid this wouldn't help with direct invocations, like just make all. Though a shell alias may help with the direct ones, so:

    MAKEFLAGS="-j4"
export MAKE="make $MAKEFLAGS"
alias make="make $MAKEFLAGS"
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  2. I'll be honest, before today I'd never seen MAKEOPTS.

    MAKEFLAGS I know of but after some research, MAKEOPTS appears to be Gentoo- (and its children) specific.

    And if it's not in the manual, it can hardly be considered standard by any stretch of the imagination.

    • 2

  3. Add

    MAKEOPTS="-j4"

    to /etc/make.conf (create it if it doesn't already exist).

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