Practice with Separate Compilation and Makefiles

Goals: This lab provides practice dividing a program into pieces, compiling those pieces separately, linking components together to form an executable, and automating this process using the Unix utilities make and Makefile.

Reference: The main reference for this lab is:

• Henry Walker, Program Management, http://www.math.grinnell.edu/~walker/courses/205.sp05/program-mgmt.shtml

Steps for this Lab: Using the discussion of trees in the Program Management material above as an example, consider the two linked list labs that appeared earlier this semester. Specifically, Lab 5 introduced singly linked lists, while Lab 6 added functionality for this work.

1. Copy your finished program for labs 5 and 6 to a new file lists-divided.c.

2. Divide this program into the following pieces, with the given file names:
   • File list-node.h will contain the definition of a node (together with the definition for the length of a string).
   • File list-proc.h will contain all list prototypes.
   • File list-add.c will contain the implementation of function addName
   • File list-count.c will contain the implementation of function countList
   • File list-delete.c will contain the implementation of function delete
   • File list-print.c will contain the implementation of function print
   • File list-print-last.c will contain the implementation of function printLast
   • File list-print-rev.c will contain the implementation of function printReverse
   • File list-put-first.c will contain the implementation of function putFirst
   • File list-main.c will contain the main program for the application.

   Thus, the node and list prototypes will each have their own files, each operation will have its own implementation file, and the main program will have another implementation file.

3. Using script to record your work, compile each of the implementation files using a relevant gcc command, and then link all of the files together using gcc. Run the resulting program to show that the various compiling and linking options have worked appropriately.

4. Write a Makefile to automate the process of compiling and linking.

5. Run the make command for each of the following cases.
   1. Test Makefile for compiling the entire program.
      (You will have to delete all .o files first.)
   2. Make a change in list-print.c, perhaps changing the message printed at the beginning or the end of the list. Then run make and describe which files are compiled and linked.
   3. Make a change in list-proc.h.c, adding only a comment to the start of the file. Again, run make and describe which files are compiled and linked.

Work to turn in:

• The submit file from Step 3.
• A copy of your Makefile.
• A discussion of what is printed for each case of Step 5.

This document is available on the World Wide Web as

     http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~walker/courses/201.sp05/lab-prog-mgmt.html

created 3 December 2001 last revised 2 May 2005
For more information, please contact Henry M. Walker at walker@cs.grinnell.edu.