How does make do it?

The make program gets its dependency "graph" from a text file called makefile or Makefile which resides in the same directory as the source files. Make checks the modification times of the files, and whenever a file becomes "newer" than something that depends on it, (in other words, modified) it runs the compiler accordingly.

For example, the previous page explained io.c was changed. If you edit io.c, it becomes "newer" than io.o, meaning that make must run cc -c io.c to create a new io.o, then run cc data.o main.o io.o -o project1 for project1.

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