GNU Make and bmake

I was trying to create a Makefile for a personal project when I recalled that bmake exists, a portable version of make from NetBSD. bmake seems quite similar to OpenBSD's make as well. I was interested in making my Makefile portable and compatible with both GNU Make and bmake but I quickly ran into a roadblock.

bmake

OpenBSD make man page

GNU Make uses "$^" as an automatic variable to expand into the list of all prerequisites (sometimes called dependencies or sources) provided to a target but bmake uses "$>" to do the same thing. Here's a simple Makefile.

automatic variables in GNU Make

The second line of this Makefile can be rewritten as "cat $^ > $@" for GNU Make. However, it needs to be written as "cat $> > $@" for bmake. "$@" is the name of the target, which is myfile.

It looks like I can either

not use automatic variables and write all the sources manually

or write Makefiles to be either GNU Make compatible or bmake compatible

Am I missing something?

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Created: 2022-09-08

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