Silence output of command in Makefile
Have you ever wanted to keep your makefile output a bit tidier? The @ symbol is your secret weapon.
Think of it like a silencer for your makefile. Every time you run a command, the makefile helpfully echos it back to you. But that echo gets silenced with the @ symbol at the beginning of a line.
This can be handy for keeping things clean, especially when you have a long list of commands in your makefile. Imagine a recipe with a million ingredients – you only care about the final dish, not every single step along the way, right?
Here's an example:
server: # Runs rails server
@RAILS_LOG_LEVEL=debug bin/rails server
See how that works? The command executed for make server runs silently in the background.
Now, remember, this doesn't mean errors magically disappear. If something goes wrong, the error message will still show up. But for everything else, it's like a behind-the-scenes operation, keeping your makefile output focused on the important stuff.
So next time you want to streamline your makefile output, grab the @ symbol and hit the mute button on those noisy commands!