10 Make

make is a command generator. It is used to automate the task of recompiling and relinking programs when you have altered a source file. Typically you create a file called Makefile or makefile (Makefile is preferred as it sorts higher in an ls listing of directory files) which contains information about which files depend on which others and lists the commands needed to create the object modules (.o files) and executable binaries.

Once you have your Makefile correctly written, whenever you want to recompile a program after changing a file, simply type:

make

and the minimum necessary compilation and linking will be done for you to produce the altered executable.

This chapter gives some advice and examples for writing Makefiles for use with Aubit4GL. For documentation, ignore the O’Reilly book (which does not cover GNU make) but go the www.gnu.org website and read the online documentation there.