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GNU Make has many powerful features for use in makefiles, beyond what other Make versions have. It can also regenerate, use, and then delete intermediate files which need not be saved.

This page is part of the make (GNU make) project. Information about the project can be found at http://www.gnu.org/software/make/ . If you have a bug report for this manual page, see http://www.gnu.org/software/make/ . This page was obtained from the tarball make-4.4.tar.gz fetched from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/make/ on 2026-01-16.

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In GNU make, the feature of remaking makefiles makes this practice obsolete—you need never tell make explicitly to regenerate the prerequisites, because it always regenerates any makefile that is out of date.

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