Technical information

148 GNU make

We feel that it is cleaner for a rule without a recipe to always simply add to the

prerequisite list for the target. The above example can be easily rewritten to get the

desired behavior in GNU make:

.c.a: ;

• Some versions of make invoke the shell with the ‘-e’ ﬂag, except under ‘-k’ (see

Section 9.6 [Testing the Compilation of a Program], page 104). The ‘-e’ ﬂag tells

the shell to exit as soon as any program it runs returns a nonzero status. We feel it is

cleaner to write each line of the recipe to stand on its own and not require this special

treatment.