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Certain names have special meanings if they appear as targets.
.PHONY
.PHONY are considered to
be phony targets. When it is time to consider such a target,
make will run its commands unconditionally, regardless of
whether a file with that name exists or what its last-modification
time is. See section Phony Targets.
.SUFFIXES
.SUFFIXES are the list
of suffixes to be used in checking for suffix rules.
See section Old-Fashioned Suffix Rules.
.DEFAULT
.DEFAULT are used for any target for
which no rules are found (either explicit rules or implicit rules).
See section Defining Last-Resort Default Rules. If .DEFAULT commands are specified, every
file mentioned as a prerequisite, but not as a target in a rule, will have
these commands executed on its behalf. See section Implicit Rule Search Algorithm.
.PRECIOUS
.PRECIOUS depends on are given the following
special treatment: if make is killed or interrupted during the
execution of their commands, the target is not deleted.
See section Interrupting or Killing make. Also, if the
target is an intermediate file, it will not be deleted after it is no
longer needed, as is normally done. See section Chains of Implicit Rules. In this latter respect it overlaps with the
.SECONDARY special target.
You can also list the target pattern of an implicit rule (such as
`%.o') as a prerequisite file of the special target .PRECIOUS
to preserve intermediate files created by rules whose target patterns
match that file's name.
.INTERMEDIATE
.INTERMEDIATE depends on are treated as
intermediate files. See section Chains of Implicit Rules.
.INTERMEDIATE with no prerequisites has no effect.
.SECONDARY
.SECONDARY depends on are treated as
intermediate files, except that they are never automatically deleted.
See section Chains of Implicit Rules.
.SECONDARY with no prerequisites causes all targets to be treated
as secondary (i.e., no target is removed because it is considered
intermediate).
.DELETE_ON_ERROR
.DELETE_ON_ERROR is mentioned as a target anywhere in the
makefile, then make will delete the target of a rule if it has
changed and its commands exit with a nonzero exit status, just as it
does when it receives a signal. See section Errors in Commands.
.IGNORE
.IGNORE, then make will
ignore errors in execution of the commands run for those particular
files. The commands for .IGNORE are not meaningful.
If mentioned as a target with no prerequisites, .IGNORE says to
ignore errors in execution of commands for all files. This usage of
`.IGNORE' is supported only for historical compatibility. Since
this affects every command in the makefile, it is not very useful; we
recommend you use the more selective ways to ignore errors in specific
commands. See section Errors in Commands.
.SILENT
.SILENT, then make will
not print the commands to remake those particular files before executing
them. The commands for .SILENT are not meaningful.
If mentioned as a target with no prerequisites, .SILENT says not
to print any commands before executing them. This usage of
`.SILENT' is supported only for historical compatibility. We
recommend you use the more selective ways to silence specific commands.
See section Command Echoing. If you want to silence all commands
for a particular run of make, use the `-s' or
`--silent' option (see section Summary of Options).
.EXPORT_ALL_VARIABLES
make to
export all variables to child processes by default.
See section Communicating Variables to a Sub-make.
.NOTPARALLEL
.NOTPARALLEL is mentioned as a target, then this invocation of
make will be run serially, even if the `-j' option is
given. Any recursively invoked make command will still be run in
parallel (unless its makefile contains this target). Any prerequisites
on this target are ignored.
Any defined implicit rule suffix also counts as a special target if it appears as a target, and so does the concatenation of two suffixes, such as `.c.o'. These targets are suffix rules, an obsolete way of defining implicit rules (but a way still widely used). In principle, any target name could be special in this way if you break it in two and add both pieces to the suffix list. In practice, suffixes normally begin with `.', so these special target names also begin with `.'. See section Old-Fashioned Suffix Rules.
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