Automation and Make

Conclusion

Learning Objectives

• Advantages of automated build tools such as Make.

Automated build tools such as Make can help us in a number of ways. They help us to automate repetitive commands and, so, save us time and reduce the risk of us making errors we might make if running these commands manually.

They can also save time by ensuring that automatically-generated artefacts (such as data files or plots) are only recreated when the files that were used to create these have changed in some way.

Through their notion of targets, dependencies and actions they serve as a form of documentation, recording dependencies between code, scripts, tools, configurations, raw data, derived data, plots and papers.

Extend the Makefile to create JPEGs

Add new rules, update existing rules, and add new macros to:

• Create .jpg files from .dat files using plotcount.py.
• Add the script and .jpg files to the archive.
• Remove all auto-generated files (.dat, .jpg, analysis.tar.gz).

The following figure shows the dependencies involved in building the analysis.tar.gz target, once we’ve added support for images: