CMake Cookbook

Implementing a multi-step test

The targets in src/testdir/Makefile indicate that the Vim code runs tests as multi-step tests: first the vim executable processes a script and produces an output file, then in a second step the output file is compared with a reference file and if these files do not differ, the test is successful. Temporary files are then removed in a third step. This can probably not be fitted into a single add_test command in a portable way since add_test can only execute one command. One solution would be to define the test steps in a Python script and to execute the Python script with some arguments. The alternative we will present here, which is also cross-platform, is to define the test steps in a separate CMake script ...