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authorAngelos Mouzakitis <a.mouzakitis@virtualopensystems.com>2023-10-10 14:33:42 +0000
committerAngelos Mouzakitis <a.mouzakitis@virtualopensystems.com>2023-10-10 14:33:42 +0000
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+---
+short-description: Build targets for custom languages or corner-cases
+...
+
+# Custom build targets
+
+While Meson tries to support as many languages and tools as possible,
+there is no possible way for it to cover all corner cases. For these
+cases it permits you to define custom build targets. Here is how one
+would use it.
+
+```meson
+comp = find_program('custom_compiler')
+
+infile = 'source_code.txt'
+outfile = 'output.bin'
+
+mytarget = custom_target('targetname',
+ output : outfile,
+ input : infile,
+ command : [comp, '@INPUT@', '@OUTPUT@'],
+ install : true,
+ install_dir : 'subdir')
+```
+
+This would generate the binary `output.bin` and install it to
+`${prefix}/subdir/output.bin`. Variable substitution works just like
+it does for source generation.
+
+See [Generating Sources](Generating-sources.md) for more information on this topic.
+
+## Details on command invocation
+
+Meson only permits you to specify one command to run. This is by
+design as writing shell pipelines into build definition files leads to
+code that is very hard to maintain. If your command requires multiple
+steps you need to write a wrapper script that does all the necessary
+work.
+
+When doing this you need to be mindful of the following issues:
+
+* do not assume that the command is invoked in any specific directory
+* a target called `target` file `outfile` defined in subdir `subdir`
+ must be written to `build_dir/subdir/foo.dat`
+* if you need a subdirectory for temporary files, use
+ `build_dir/subdir/target.dir`