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Writing a makefile

The GNU make program automatically determines which pieces of a large program need to be recompiled, and issues the commands to compile them. You need a file called a makefile to tell make what to do. Most often, the makefile tells make how to compile and link a program.

In this section, we will discuss a simple makefile that describes how to compile and link a text editor which consists of eight C source files and three header files. The makefile can also tell make how to run miscellaneous commands when explicitly asked (for example, to remove certain files as a clean-up operation).

Although the examples in this section show C programs, 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.

Your makefile describes the relationships among files in your program and provides commands for updating each file. In a program, typically, the executable file is updated from object files, which are in turn made by compiling source files.

Once a suitable makefile exists, each time you change some source files, this simple shell command:

make

suffices to perform all necessary recompilations. The make program uses the makefile database and the last-modification times of the files to decide which of the files need to be updated. For each of those files, it issues the commands recorded in the database.

You can provide command line arguments to make to control which files should be recompiled, or how.

When make recompiles the editor, each changed C source file must be recompiled. If a header file has changed, each C source file that includes the header file must be recompiled to be safe. Each compilation produces an object file corresponding to the source file. Finally, if any source file has been recompiled, all the object files, whether newly made or saved from previous compilations, must be linked together to produce the new executable editor.