Automatically add all files in a folder to a target using CMake?

c++ cross-platform cmake
martjno picture martjno · Jul 8, 2010 · Viewed 154.4k times · Source

I am considering switching a cross platform project from separate build management systems in Visual C++, XCode and makefiles to CMake.

One essential feature I need is to add automatically all files in a directory to a target. While this is easy to do with make, it is not easily doable with Visual C++ and XCode (correct me if I am wrong). Is it possible to do it in directly in CMake? How?

Answer

Kleist picture Kleist · Jul 8, 2010

It is possible. E.g. with file(GLOB:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8)

file(GLOB helloworld_SRC
    "*.h"
    "*.cpp"
)

add_executable(helloworld ${helloworld_SRC})

Note that this requires manual re-running of cmake if a source file is added or removed, since the generated build system does not know when to ask CMake to regenerate, and doing it at every build would increase the build time.

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