Make — a program for maintaining computer programs

Abstract

Abstract Good programmers break their projects into a number of pieces, each to be processed or compiled by a different chain of programs. After a set of changes is made, the series of actions that must be taken can be quite complex, and costly errors are frequently made. This paper describes a program that can keep track of the relationships between parts of a program, and issue the commands needed to make the parts consistent after changes are made. Make has been in use on UNIX UNIX is a trademark of Bell Laboratories. systems since 1975. The underlying idea is quite simple and can be adapted to many other environments.