Creating a directory in CMake

cmake
Jookia picture Jookia · Sep 13, 2010 · Viewed 86.1k times · Source

In CMake, I want to create a directory if it doesn't already exist. How can I do this?

Answer

Chin Huang picture Chin Huang · Sep 13, 2010

When do you want to create the directory?

At build system generation

To create a directory when CMake generates the build system,

file(MAKE_DIRECTORY ${directory})

At build time

In the add_custom_command() command (which adds a custom build rule to the generated build system), and the add_custom_target() command (which adds a target with no output so it will always be built), you specify the commands to execute at build time. Create a directory by executing the command ${CMAKE_COMMAND} -E make_directory. For example:

add_custom_target(build-time-make-directory ALL
    COMMAND ${CMAKE_COMMAND} -E make_directory ${directory})

At install time

To create a directory at install time,

install(DIRECTORY DESTINATION ${directory})

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