The Power Of Makefile

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A makefile is a special file, containing shell commands, While in the directory containing this makefile, you will type make and the commands in the makefile will be executed

Get Started:

touch Makefile

Open Makefile and paste the following lines into it which three tasks

help ,install andprepare

by default, make considers first task as default task to change this behavior add this line

.DEFAULT_GOAL := prepare

Now type make

Execute a set of tasks in one command

Assume you have a project and you have first to clean unwanted files then you have to download a file then execute the command it will be a lot of hassle to tell a user to do a set of tasks instead of that we can do it via a single and short command using Makefile.

so we have to define make file contains set of tasks clean, download, execute and install which will be the task that executes [clean, download, execute]

and this can happen using this syntax

install: clean download execute

As you see i have only two files ( Makefile and dummy.txt), dummy.txt contains text

Makefile Example:

Now type make which will execute install

as we can see it executed three tasks clean, download and execute

and we have ipInfo.sh exists in current dir and it cleared dummy.txt content.

Autogenerate help command to make:

follow that then you will be able to generate it from comments

just you have to add comments that start with `##` then add the description

Output