This is slightly different from Can a Makefile execute code ONLY when an error has occurred?.
I'd like a rule or special target that is made whenever an error occurs (independent of the given target; without changing the rule for every target as the other answer seems to imply with the || operator).
In dmake there is special target .ERROR that is executed whenever an error condition is detected. Is there a similar thing with GNU make?
(I'm still using GNU make 3.81, but I didn't find anything in the documentation of the new GNU make 4.0 either)
Gnu doesn't support it explicitly, but there's ways to hack almost anything. Make returns 1 if any of the makes fail. This means that you could, on the command line, rerun make with your error rule if the first make failed:
make || make error_targ
Of course, I'll assume you just want to put the added complexity within the makefile itself. If this is the case, you can create a recursive make file:
all:
$(MAKE) normal_targ || $(MAKE) error_targ
normal_targ:
... normal make rules ...
error_targ:
... other make rules ...
This will cause the makefile to try to build normal_targ, and iff it fails, it will run error_targ. It makes it a bit harder to read the makefile for the inexperienced, but it puts all the logic in one place.