On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Besides building programs, Make can be how to make chocolate to manage any project where some files must be updated automatically from others whenever the others change. 0, which featured a variety of tools targeting software development tasks.

Stuart Feldman, The Art of Unix Programming, Eric S. Before Make’s introduction, the Unix build system most commonly consisted of operating system dependent “make” and “install” shell scripts accompanying their program’s source. Being able to combine the commands for the different targets into a single file and being able to abstract out dependency tracking and archive handling was an important step in the direction of modern build environments. Make has gone through a number of rewrites, including a number of from-scratch variants which used the same file format and basic algorithmic principles and also provided a number of their own non-standard enhancements.

It provides several extensions over the original Make, such as conditionals. It also provides many built-in functions which can be used to eliminate the need for shell-scripting in the makefile rules as well as to manipulate the variables set and used in the makefile. Glenn Fowler’s nmake is unrelated to the Microsoft program of the same name. Its input is similar to Make, but not compatible. This program provides shortcuts and built-in features, which according to its developers reduces the size of makefiles by a factor of 10. Microsoft nmake, a command-line tool which normally is part of Visual Studio.