On Fri, 2021-08-13 at 17:23 +0200, Julius Hamilton wrote: > Which part of the documentation discusses these commands?
The table of contents of the GNU make manual is here: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/index.html The early chapters allow you to interpret a makefile. You can see Chapter 6 for a discussion on variables. The important thing to understand about makefiles is that it combines two different languages in a single file: everything that is NOT indented with a TAB character is written in makefile syntax, which is described in the above manual. Everything that IS indented with a TAB character is not makefile syntax: it's shell syntax. Those are commands that make invokes to build the targets and it invokes those commands by sending them to the shell. Those commands are NOT described in the above manual, because they are not makefile commands. Make is extremely flexible because it can run any command that you can invoke from your shell prompt. So, things like "install", "gzip", "rm", etc. in your example are other tools and you'll need to go find the documentation for those tools somewhere else. A great starting point are the man pages installed on any standard POSIX system, so at your shell prompt try running: man rm man gzip man install to learn about them.
