I've the following rm command in a makefile for a C program.

clean:
rm -f [^m]*[^ch]

As I understand this should delete all files which doesn't start with the letter 'm' or end with the letters 'c' or 'h'.

The strange thing is that the above command works fine when I run it on a CentOS system, the files which I want to delete are deleted.

But when I run the exact same command on a Debian-based system (Mint), it doesn't work, the object files are not deleted.

I've the same version of make (3.81) installed on both systems.

Can someone explain what is going on here?

After tinkering with the command further, I found out something even weirder. On Mint, when I run the rm as a standalone command, it deletes the files which I want. But when I run the command through make in the following way:
$ make clean

The command doesn't work, as far as I could tell no files are deleted.

On CentOS however, everything works as they should.

Now I'm really confused.

Have you made absolutely sure that there is a tab, and not spaces, before rm -f [^m]*[^ch]

Like this:
Viewing this in Vim with :set list yields:
Best regards,
HMW

This is a very odd thing to code as part of your Makefile clean method.

Firstly, all targets are generated and known, correct? So you can remove $(OBJS) and or $(TARGET).

Using some oddball wildcard rm statement is risky. Just my humble opinion there. I have no real problem saying something like "rm -f *.o", I just think you're overdoing it, but do realize that it's your choice.

There is a tab before rm in the actual makefile(just double checked). For some reason I couldn't get tab to work when typing texts in this forum, hence the lack of indentation in the example.

As mentioned before, the odd thing is that "make clean" works on my CentOS machine but doesn't work under Mint. Still have no clue why it is exhibiting such behavior.

I do realize using "rm $(objects)" will work just well in my case. But I would still love to figure out what is going on with my overkill rm command.

You could do an strace on the make process and see what it is trying to do. I'm wondering whether make hands off those pathname expansions to a shell or does them itself. If the latter, there could certainly be differences between the two versions.