I have never been able to do this from the command line. This is
because the main Makefile uses the $MAKE variable to do the sub-makes
in the various subdirectories in the source tree. In order to get the
-j option passed to the sub-makes, you need to edit the definition of
the $MAKE variable. It could be nice if the main Makefile was fixed so
it passes all the make command line option settings to the sub-makes.
BTW: -j will start as many processes as it has targets for. In the ip
directory, and a couple of others, this results in upwards of 20-30
compiles going at once. At that point, my machine with 32M of RAM
seems to begin to spend more time swapping than making any progress on
the compiles. I use "-j5 -l5" to keep the number of (j)obs and the
(l)oadavg under control. I have also noticed that sometimes make will
spawn more jobs than -j5 limits it to. A reducing load average,
falling from above 5 to below, while there are more than five targets
left to make, will usually cause make to disregard -j5 and spawn the
rest of the targets.
--- Andrew C. Esh mailto:andrew_esh@cnt.com Computer Network Technology andrewes@mtn.org (finger for PGP key) 6500 Wedgwood Road 612.550.8000 (main) Maple Grove MN 55311 612.550.8229 (direct) http://www.cnt.com - CNT Inc. Home Page http://www.mtn.org/~andrewes - ACE Home Page