GNU Make Manual
The make
utility automatically determines which pieces of a large program need to be recompiled, and issues commands to recompile them. This manual describes GNU make
, which was implemented by Richard Stallman and Roland McGrath. Development since Version 3.76 has been handled by Paul D. Smith.
GNU make
conforms to section 6.2 of IEEE Standard 1003.2-1992 (POSIX.2). Our examples show C programs, since they are most common, but you can use make
with any programming language whose compiler can be run with a shell command. Indeed, make
is not limited to programs. You can use it to describe any task where some files must be updated automatically from others whenever the others change.