The text-if-true
may be any lines of text, to be considered as part of the makefile if the
condition is true. If the condition is false, no text is used instead.
The syntax of a complex conditional is as follows.
If the condition is true, text-if-true is used; otherwise, text-if-false is used instead.
The text-if-false can be any number of lines of text.
The syntax of the conditional-directive
is the same whether the conditional is simple or complex. There are four
different directives that test different conditions. The following is a
description of them.
Often you want to test if a variable has a non-empty value.
When the value results from complex expansions of variables and functions, expansions you would consider empty may actually contain whitespace characters and thus are not seen as empty.
However, you can use the strip function (see Functions for string substitution and analysis) to avoid interpreting whitespace as a non-empty value.
For example, the following will evaluate text-if-empty even if the expansion of $(foo) contains whitespace characters.
ifdef variable-name
The other two directives that play a part in a conditional are else and endif. Each of these directives is written as one word, with no arguments. Extra spaces are allowed and ignored at the beginning of the line, and spaces or tabs at the end. A comment starting with # may appear at the end of the line.
Conditionals affect which lines of the makefile make uses. If the condition is true, make reads the lines of the text-if-true as part of the makefile; if the condition is false, make ignores those lines completely. It follows that syntactic units of the makefile, such as rules, may safely be split across the beginning or the end of the conditional.
make evaluates conditionals when it reads a makefile. Consequently, you cannot use automatic variables in the tests of conditionals because they are not defined until commands are run (see Automatic variables). To prevent intolerable confusion, it is not permitted to start a conditional in one makefile and end it in another. However, you may write an include directive within a conditional, provided you do not attempt to terminate the conditional inside the included file.