@shorttitlepage GNU Make Copyright (C) 1988, '89, '90, '91, '92, '93, '94, '95, '96, '97 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Published by the Free Software Foundation
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Printed copies are available for $20 each.
ISBN 1-882114-80-9
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Free Software Foundation.
Cover art by Etienne Suvasa.
make
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. 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.
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