A Helping Hand With Makefiles

fb_config Options

The fb_config script is intended to be used from within a makefile to supply various settings and compiler options which are accurate and specific to the installation being used.

Note

This script can be run by any user who has been given execute privileges to it. You do not need to be root to use this script.

fb_config Options

To run the fb_config script, use a commandline similar to the following :

fb_config <option> [ <option> [...]]

The script takes one or more options on the commandline :

--help

This parameter displays the list of allowed options. It should not be supplied in addition to other options.
--cflags

This option returns the list of directories where Firebird include files are stored. This is required by the C and C++ compilers to allow compiler #include directives to be correctly resolved. On my own system, this option returns '-I/opt/firebird/include'.
--libs

This option returns the list of directories where Firebird libraries are located and a list of those libraries that are required to be linked by the linker to create a client server Firebird application. This option returns '-L/opt/firebird/lib -lfbclient' on my system.
--embedlibs

This option returns the list of directories where Firebird libraries are located and a list of those libraries that are required to be linked by the linker to create an embedded Firebird application. This option returns '-L/opt/firebird/lib -lfbembed' on my system.
--bindir

On my system, this option returns '/opt/firebird/bin' as the full path to the Firebird /bin directory.
--version

This option returns a three part version string made up of the concatenation of the Firebird build version, a dash, the package version, a dot and the system architecture. My own laptop Linux system returns '1.5.0.4290-0.i686'.

The following is a brief excerpt from a makefile which shows how to define two macros, FBFLAGS and FBLIBS, and initialise them to the correct values using fb_config. Note the use of the back tick character (`) rather than a single quote character (').

...
FBFLAGS = `fb_config --cflags`
FBLIBS = `fb_config --libs`
...