If you are supporting a C++ project, you are likely to come across a makefile. This is a text file containing the targets, dependencies, and rules for building the targets in the project. The makefile is invoked through the make tool, nmake on Windows and make on Unix-like platforms.
A makefile is a series of rules that look as follows:
targets : dependents commands
The targets are one or more files that depend on the dependents (which may be several files), so that if one or more of the dependents is newer than one or more of the targets (and hence has changed since the targets were last built), then the targets need to be built again, which is done by running the commands. There may be more than one command, and each one ...
