> What does make file do? What other things can
> You do with it?

makefile is a set of instructions for a program called make that can run
commands for you (and save a lot of typing and time). I think someone once
wrote an adventure game in make but that  is beyond the point. make works
by rules. Eg rules:

this: a b c
<tab>   some_program -input a b c -output this

that: this
<tab>   some_other_program -input this -output that

<tab> means one or more tab characters. This is important. You cannot use
spaces here for most make programs.

Each step in your job is described by a rule, and make will know how to
find them. Eg for the above 'make that' will go to the that rule, discover
that it depends on this, go to the this rule, find a, b, c, and produce
this from them, then go back to the that rule and make that from this. But
if this already exists when that looks for it, then it will be used
instead of being made, provided it is more recent than all of a,b and c.

make does not care what the programs actually do, it just knows how to
navigate the rules and run the programs. It also has a lot of clever
defaults built in, and wildcards, and default build rules and much much
more. It seems to be the standard tool for building software packages
under most operating systems excepting M$ Windows (which had to have their
own kind of make which is incompatible with everyone else's, by using
different default rules).

Peter

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