Make — a program for maintaining computer programs

Abstract

Good programmers break their projects into a number of pieces, each to be processed or compiled by a different chain of programs. After a set of changes is made, the series of actions that must be taken can be quite complex, and costly errors are frequently made. This paper describes a program that can keep track of the relationships between parts of a program, and issue the commands needed to make the parts consistent after changes are made. Make has been in use on UNIX systems since 1975. The underlying idea is quite simple and can be adapted to many other environments. Copyright © 1979 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.