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The ‘--print-directory’Option

If you use several levels of recursive make invocations, the options, ‘-w’ or ‘--print-directory’ 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 like the following before doing anything else.

make: Entering directory ‘/u/gnu/make’.

Then, a line of the following form when processing is completed.

make: Leaving directory ‘/u/gnu/make’.

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-make s. 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.