Re: Basic introductory concepts

[Paul Smith]

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.