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Programming - Make - Fake Target

By default, make only tries to build the first thing it finds.

Sometimes you’ll see a fake target as the first thing like this:

all : hello hello2 hello3

NOTE: This assumes that there are rules for the 3 hello programs elsewhere and make will build all three.

This works as long as you never have a file name all in the working directory.

Prevent problems using all

To prevent that being a problem, you can declare that target as phony by using this statement in the makefile:

.PHONY: all

NOTE: Actions can be attached to phony targets as well. For example:

.PHONY: clean
clean: 
     rm *.o

NOTE: You can issue make clean from the command line to remove all the object files.