Make alone is not enough to build programs. It helps keep the environment clean and saves a lot of valuable time.

Windows do not run linux shell commands by default, but you can do it with specialized version of it for Windows.ĭuring building executable programs many intermediate files are created that need not be there when the building is finished.

As it is a bunch of shell commands, it can run anywhere shell command runs. Makefile is a text file of shell commands organized structurally with dependency and other logic for building the program and managing other non-source files. It does not care what programming language or which dialect of them you are using. It tracks which files are changed and resolve dependency accordingly to build rebuild the specific part of the program. If a codebase is very big then it is time consuming and problematic building an executable from from scratch when the change in source code is very small. Make enables end users to build executable programs without knowing technical details of how to build them.Īll the details of how to build executables and process non-source files are listed in the makefile – so the process becomes repeatable by all people or systems trying to build a project. Make is the de-facto tool for building executable programs from source code in the world of open source.

Make gets the logic of building the executables and processing other non-source files from a file called a makefile or a Makefile. GNU Make is a tool that helps to generate executable programs from source code and also process other non-source files from the project.

How to create a makefile for c program