Question

I have a simple makefile that compiles a p.c file to an executable using gcc on Linux.
The p.c file depends on a a.h file.
My makefile looks like this:

//makefile
CC = gcc

build: p.c a.h
    $(CC) -o out p.c
clean:
    rm -f *.exe
rebuild: clean build

Answer 1

Your makefile doesn’t produce the files it promises to produce, namely build, clean and rebuild. Since these targets are not files they should be marked as phony targets:

.PHONY: build clean rebuild

build target should be:

build : out

out : p.c a.h
    $(CC) -o $@ p.c