Question

I am new to writing makefiles. Recently I have seen pattern rules in makefiles. For example:

%.o: %.cc
        # command to compile comes here

After rigourous searching in the net, I found out what the above statement does,
But I came across another statement below.

%: %.o
        # Command to link lies here

I do not understand this rule. Can anyone explain the second pattern rule?

Answer 1

The second rule is also a pattern rule, it says how to make a file with no extension from a file with the same name, but .o at the end. So it’s a rule to link foo from foo.o, bar from bar.o and so on.