Mk is a reboot of the Plan 9 mk command, which itself is a successor to make. It is a fork of mk by Daniel C. Jones.

Installation

If you have gccgo, you can build and install mk with make:

$ make
$ make install

You can also use go to install mk with any Go implementation:

$ go get github.com/lenticularis39/mk

Changes from Plan 9 mk

mk stays mostly faithful to Plan 9, but makes a few changes.

A clean, modern implementation in Go.
Parallel by default.
Use Go regular expressions, which are perl-like, instead of Plan 9 regex.
Regex matches are substituted into rule prerequisites with $stem1, $stem2, etc., rather than \1, \2, etc.
Allow blank lines in recipes. A recipe is any indented block of text, and continues until a non-indented character or the end of the file.
Add an 'S' attribute to execute recipes with programs other than sh. This way, you don't have to separate your six line python script into its own file. Just stick it directly in the mkfile.

Usage

mk [options] [target] ...

Options

-f filename Use the given file as the mkfile.
-n Dry run, print commands without actually executing.
-r Force building of the immediate targets.
-a Force building the targets and of all their dependencies.
-p Maximum number of jobs to execute in parallel (default: 8)
-i Show rules that will execute and prompt before executing.

Non-shell recipes

Non-shell recipes are a major addition over Plan 9 mk. They can be used with the S[command] attribute, where command is an arbitrary command that the recipe will be piped into. For example, here's a recipe to add the read numbers from a file and write their mean to another file. Unlike a typical recipe, it's written in Julia.

mean.txt:Sjulia: input.txt
    println(open("$target", "w"),
            mean(map(parseint, eachline(open("$prereq")))))

Current State

Functional, but with some bugs and some unimplemented minor features.

lenticularis39 / mk