On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the how to make potato wedges across from the article title. Besides building programs, Make can be used 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. It supports preprocessor directives such as includes and conditional expressions which use variables set on the command-line or within the makefiles.

Mk replaced Make in Research Unix, starting from version 9. A redesign of the original tool by Bell Labs programmer Andrew G. Hume, it features a different syntax. Mk became the standard build tool in Plan 9, Bell Labs’ intended successor to Unix.

Kati is Google’s replacement of GNU Make, used in Android OS builds. It translates the makefile into ninja for faster incremental builds. Snakemake is a python-driven implementation for compiling and running bioinformatics workflows. POSIX includes standardization of the basic features and operation of the Make utility, and is implemented with varying degrees of completeness in Unix-based versions of Make. In general, simple makefiles may be used between various versions of Make with reasonable success. Make is typically used to build executable programs and libraries from source code. Generally though, Make is applicable to any process that involves executing arbitrary commands to transform a source file to a target result.