Autotools: how to cleanup files created by “./configure” in lighttpd project?

Question

I'm trying out lighttpd for an embedded Linux project. I got the latest source package and started writing a master Makefile encapsulating all configure, compile, install (for testing) etc stuff.

And vice-versa, I want to cleanup every step. After the cleanup there should be no generated files anymore. This is important for repetitive testing.

I wonder if there is a way to do a complete cleanup of what ./configure generated? I'm not familiar with autotools in details.

Any hints?

Answer 1

I personally would really use the features of a source control software (you should use one) for this. This would cleanup make independent of your build process. See eg svn-cleanup or git clean .

Nevertheless, automake allows some tweaking when to remove which files. This has (intentionally?) built-in limitations on what files generated by autotools can be remove this way though. Have a look at the definitions for MOSTLYCLEANFILES, CLEANFILES, DISTCLEANFILES, and MAINTAINERCLEANFILES and adjust your Makefile.am 's. With them you can remove a lot of stuff with

make mostlyclean
make clean
make distclean
make maintainer-clean

You won't be able to remove eg Makefile or .deps/ this way.

As for the reliability of make clean it should "work 100%" if you stick to cleanly specifying your files and stay away from manual intervention. Otherwise extend the cleanup rules .

Answer 2

In addition to Benjamin Bannier's answer , the generated files names may be listed in .gitignore file so that they are ignored, not tracked with git and don't irritate and bother when run git status . You can't remove these files with git clean . In this case I personally use rm -rf * ; git checkout . rm -rf * ; git checkout . command.

But don't use that if you have other ignored files which you don't want to be removed!