Hi Monks,

I have a somehow "inverted" Perl problem here.

I have a lot of small applications I wrote over the time that depend on a bunch of common source files (tools). This is stuff where I never bothered to "autoconf" anything and which is expected to run on both win32 and Unix/Linux (for win32, there will be VC6/VC2005 config stuff in the appropriate dirs).

When using an Unix/Linux Makefile template (since aeons), I throwed in at some point a line that determines the applications name which is going to get built. E.g.: If I have an Unix app to build in "../sources/applications/worlddomination":

 sources
    |
    +---applications
    |       |
    |       +---loveandpeace
    |       |       |
    |       |       +---unix
    |       |       |
    |       |       +---win32
    |       |
    |       +---worlddomination
    |               |
    |               +---unix
    |               |
    |               +---win32
    |
    +---tools--- ...
[download]

there will be a (generic) Makefile in the "./worlddomination/unix" directory that emits a:

  .SUFFIXES: .cxx .cpp .c .o
  # APPNAME is the parent directory of the current one
  APPNAME = ${shell perl -MCwd -e 'print +(split/\//,cwd)[-2]'}
  EXE = ${APPNAME} 
  ...
  (the usual stuff follows)
  ...
[download]

and makes an application "worlddomination" (does in most cases work). I'm not a makefile guru and therefore my question: How can this be done *simpler* with one or two shell commands (I feel the Perl invocation of ${shell perl -MCwd -e 'print +(split/\//,cwd)[-2]'} is somehow a big hammer for this purpose).

Regards & Thanks

mwa