Chapter 3. GNU make

In Red Hat Developer Toolset, GNU make is provided by the devtoolset-9-make package and is automatically installed with devtoolset-9-toolchain as described in Section 1.5, “Installing Red Hat Developer Toolset”.

To build a program without using a Makefile, run the make tool as follows:

$ scl enable devtoolset-9 'make source_file_without_extension'

This command makes use of implicit rules that are defined for a number of programming languages, including C, C++, and Fortran. The result is a binary file named source_file_without_extension in the current working directory.

Note that you can execute any command using the scl utility, causing it to be run with the Red Hat Developer Toolset binaries used in preference to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux system equivalent. This allows you to run a shell session with Red Hat Developer Toolset make as default:

$ scl enable devtoolset-9 'bash'

$ which make

$ make -v

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  printf("Hello, World!\n");
  return 0;
}

$ scl enable devtoolset-9 'make hello'
cc     hello.c   -o hello

To build complex programs that consist of a number of source files, make uses configuration files called Makefiles that control how to compile the components of a program and build the final executable. Makefiles can also contain instructions for cleaning the working directory, installing and uninstalling program files, and other operations.

make automatically uses files named GNUmakefile, makefile, or Makefile in the current directory. To specify another file name, use the -f option:

$ make -f make_file

Describing the details of Makefile syntax is beyond the scope of this guide. See GNU make, the upstream GNU make manual, which provides an in-depth description of the GNU make utility, Makefile syntax, and their usage.

The full make manual is also available in the Texinfo format as a part of your installation. To view this manual:

$ scl enable devtoolset-9 'info make'

CC=gcc
CFLAGS=-c -Wall
SOURCE=hello.c
OBJ=$(SOURCE:.c=.o)
EXE=hello

all: $(SOURCE) $(EXE)

$(EXE): $(OBJ)
        $(CC) $(OBJ) -o $@

.o: .c
        $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $< -o $@

clean:
        rm -rf $(OBJ) $(EXE)

$ scl enable devtoolset-9 'make'
gcc -c -Wall hello.c -o hello.o
gcc hello.o -o hello

$ scl enable devtoolset-9 'make clean'
rm -rf hello.o hello

For more information about the GNU make tool and its features, see the resources listed below.

Installed Documentation

Online Documentation

See Also