Make seems to me simply a shell script with slightly easier handling of command line arguments.
Why is it standard to run make instead of ./make.sh
Share
Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
Make seems to me simply a shell script with slightly easier handling of command line arguments.
Why is it standard to run make instead of ./make.sh
The general idea is that
makesupports (reasonably) minimal rebuilds — i.e., you tell it what parts of your program depend on what other parts. When you update some part of the program, it only rebuilds the parts that depend on that. While you could do this with a shell script, it would be a lot more work (explicitly checking the last-modified dates on all the files, etc.) The only obvious alternative with a shell script is to rebuild everything every time. For tiny projects this is a perfectly reasonable approach, but for a big project a complete rebuild could easily take an hour or more — usingmake, you might easily accomplish the same thing in a minute or two…I should probably also add that there are quite a few alternatives to make that have at least broadly similar capabilities. Especially in cases where only a few files in a large project are being rebuilt, some of them (e.g., Ninja) are often considerably faster than make.