Summary

A good understanding of make and how it operates are an essential skill in any modern software development environment. This chapter provided a brief introduction to some of the capabilities of the GNU make utility. GNU make has a rich set of capabilities beyond what was discussed in this chapter; a consultation of the resources should help the user who will be using make extensively.

Most of the large projects in Linux software development do not employ make directly but instead employ the GNU automake/autoconf utilities that are layered on top of GNU make . Chapter 9 will introduce GNU automake/autoconf , which should be used when starting a new Linux development project. Don t worry; the understanding of GNU make introduced in this chapter will be invaluable when understanding and debugging problems in the GNU automake/autoconf environment.