Summary

This chapter opened the door to actual programming with CMake – you're now able to write great, informative comments and utilize built-in commands, and you’ll understand how to correctly provide all kinds of arguments to them. This knowledge alone will help you understand the unusual syntax of CMake listfiles that you might have seen in projects created by others.

Next, we have covered variables in CMake – specifically, how to reference, set, and unset normal, cache, and environment variables. We delved into, how file and directory variable scopes work, how to create them and what issues we might encounter and how to solve them.

We also covered lists and control structures. We examined the syntax of conditions, their logical operations, the evaluation of unquoted arguments, as well as strings and variables. We learned how to compare values, do simple checks, and examine the state of the files in the system. This allows us to write conditional blocks and...