Linux Make tutorial

usmangt

Hello,

I am looking for the Linux make command tutorial ( a video tutorial will be great, i search here in video tutorial but when type make in the search box gives something else where make word is type ) i have recently learn some basic programming of c language and using GCC for it.

Now i want to use the make tool for compiling and executing many files together. I have Google around and found the make file tutorials but too be honest i didn't understand from those and got confused.

It will be nice if someone of you know a good tutorial for a beginner to use Linux make files tool ( video one will be good ) so it can help in getting familiar with it.

Thank you

usman

mfillpot

Due to the many options that may be presented by the developers for compiling software I do not think that a general video tutorial will be available, but the official automake user guide is at http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html. If you are also wanting to use the other auto-tools you can find links to mailing-lists and documentation at http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~adl/autotools.html

usmangt

Hi,

The guide from the redhat is really big but i think it's not that much related to compile gcc files (c language programs) and make them all work together. The guide is more on the other tools and advanced operations.

mfillpot

The make utility is used along side the autoconf utility to build the configure and make scripts necessary to build your packages, you must look into the full set of utilities to find the options that will help you to build the correct scripts to build your package using autotools. The reading may be a bit lengthy, but there are automatic scripts included that will help to ease the process.

You will need to read the guide (http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/index.html)to using all tools and work through trial and error to make the necessary scripts for your packages to use make on the gcc compiler.

mantosh4u

Hello@usman

The Make utility is not for beginner's use. The best way to understand Make utility is to go through the official manual , which you can download from the GNU community website.


Basically Make internally uses the last modified time stamp of file, for deciding whether to compile of not. I mean lets say you have one source file hello.c and you compiled this particular file using gcc you would got hello.o for first time. Now if you add/ remove some line in your source file hello.c and again used gcc for compilation make utility would generate a new hello.o file . But lets say if you have not changed anything in your original hello.c then make will not generate any new hello.o file.

So in short " If make utility check that source file last modified time stamp is latest than the object file(.o) file that means source file has been changed since last compilation , in that case make would generate a new object file otherwise make would skip the recompilation for that particular source file."


The above concept is very useful and important for larger projects. Because if you have changed in a particular source file than there is no need to recompile everything all over again. Only the dependent files should be recompiled ....This can be done by using make utility .... This reduces great amount of time while we are in development phase of any project. Because during that time we sometime change some line in a particular file in the entire project.


Hope above explanation would be of some use to you.. For usage please go through the official manual from GNU .


Regards,
Mantosh Kumar

saqman2060

Can you give us the exact link to the GNU site regarding the make utility?

mfillpot

saqman2060 wrote:

Can you give us the exact link to the GNU site regarding the make utility?

http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/

mantosh4u

Hi,

http://www.gnu.org/manual/manual.html

Above link contains the information about all GNU utility manuals.


However if you want make utility manual , you can download from the link given below.

http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/



Hope this info would be useful to you. Please let me know if you want some more information regarding this .

Regrads,
Mantosh Kumar

marc

Ph03nix wrote:

give us screenshot please...

Screenshot of what?