before talking about Makefiles, compilers are important pre-knowledge.

first compile a executable ELF file, by:

gcc code.c -o program# run it by:./program

if we are going to compile one/several object file first, and put them into a shared object file:

# compile without linking(-c) compatible with shared obj(-fpic), to a.o & b.ogcc -c -fpic a.cgcc -c -fpic b.c# put a.o & b.o into a shared obj(.so) called libtest.sogcc -shared -o libtest.so a.o b.o

if we are going to install the generated libtest.so to system, mv it to /usr/lib and do a sudo ldconfig, of-course if removing an lib from /usr/lib, do a sudo ldconfig to clear cache of libs.

to compile a program against a lib which can be found by ldconfig -p|grep libtest.so: (keep in mind, gcc auto cuts the lib & .so part of a lib's name, thus libtest.so is used as test, together with -l, makes -ltest)

gcc -ltest -o program code.c# run it by:./program

according to , finding specific lib link name by pkg-config:

pkg-config --libs --cflags python# where --libs gives compiler link usage, --cflags gives compiler include usage

 

Standard Makefile Targets:

make allBuild programs, libraries, documentation, etc. (same as make).make installInstall what needs to be installed, copying the files from the package’s tree to system-wide directories.make install-stripSame as make install, then strip debugging symbols. Some users like to trade space for useful bug reports...make uninstallThe opposite of make install: erase the installed files. (This needs to be run from the same build tree that was installed.)make cleanErase from the build tree the files built by make all.make distcleanAdditionally erase anything ./configure created.make checkRun the test suite, if any.make installcheckCheck the installed programs or libraries, if supported.make distRecreate package-version.tar.gz from all the source files.

Standard Directory Variables:

Directory variable    Default valueprefix    /usr/local  exec_prefix    ${prefix}    bindir    ${exec_prefix}/bin    libdir    ${exec_prefix}/lib    …  includedir    ${prefix}/include  datarootdir    ${prefix}/share    datadir    ${datarootdir}    mandir    ${datarootdir}/man    infodir    ${datarootdir}/info    docdir    ${datarootdir}/doc/${PACKAGE}  …

Some Standard Configuration Variables: If wondering the difference between CFLAGS/CPPFALGS/CXXFLAGS, see

CCC compiler commandCFLAGSC compiler flagsCXXC++ compiler commandCXXFLAGSC++ compiler flagsLDFLAGSlinker flagsCPPFLAGSC/C++ preprocessor flags…

We can create a config.site for each directory/share that when selecting this directory as -prefix, the directory/share/config.site will always be included when doing ./configure -prefix=directory.

For more info about config.site, goto .

VPATH build tree: we can configure from another dir such as build.. 

~/amhello-1.0 % mkdir build && cd build~/amhello-1.0/build % ../configure…~/amhello-1.0/build % make…

<!--build gcc for cross compile to other platform.. />

./configure --target i686-pc-linux-gnu # --build --host ..

to make install program with prefix/suffix name..

--program-prefix=prefixPrepend prefix to installed program names.--program-suffix=suffixAppend suffix to installed program names.--program-transform-name=programRun sed program on installed program names../configure --program-prefix test-

is an example of make install with staged-installation-dir.. after that the packed tgz can be unpacked and install to other hosts.. without the need to run make..

~/amhello-1.0 % make DESTDIR=$HOME/inst install…~/amhello-1.0 % cd ~/inst~/inst % find . -type f -print > ../files.lst~/inst % tar zcvf ~/amhello-1.0-i686.tar.gz `cat ../files.lst`./usr/bin/hello./usr/share/doc/amhello/README

we can also build a tarball with make distcheck

also, if we compile something for one time, we dont need to generate a dependency tree for renew compilings..

--disable-dependency-tracking　　Speed up one-time builds.--enable-dependency-tracking　　Do not reject slow dependency extractors.

Important AM suffixes:

_PROGRAMS,_SOURCES,_LDADD,_TEXINFOS

If the environment variable AUTOMAKE_JOBS contains a positive number, it is taken as the maximum number of Perl threads to use inautomake for generating multiple Makefile.in files concurrently. This is an experimental feature.