The ‘--print-directory’ Option

If you use several levels of recursive make invocations, the ‘-w’ or ‘--print-directory’ option can make the output a lot easier to understand by showing each directory as make starts processing it and as make finishes processing it. For example, if ‘make -w’ is run in the directory /u/gnu/make, make will print a line of the form:

make: Entering directory `/u/gnu/make'.

before doing anything else, and a line of the form:

make: Leaving directory `/u/gnu/make'.

when processing is completed.

Normally, you do not need to specify this option because ‘make’ does it for you: ‘-w’ is turned on automatically when you use the ‘-C’ option, and in sub-makes. make will not automatically turn on ‘-w’ if you also use ‘-s’, which says to be silent, or if you use ‘--no-print-directory’ to explicitly disable it.