Hello World in Gnu Make

Welcome to the Hello World in Gnu Make page! Here, you'll find the source code for this program as well as a description of how the program works.

Current Solution

$(info Hello, World!)

.PHONY: all
all: ;@:

Hello World in Gnu Make was written by:

• rzuckerm

This article was written by:

• Ron Zuckerman
• rzuckerm

If you see anything you'd like to change or update, please consider contributing.

How to Implement the Solution

The info function displays the text that follows it, so this just displays "Hello, World!":

$(info Hello, World!)

In general, all functions in GNU Make have this form:

$(function arguments)

Since GNU Make is a build system, it needs something to build, or else it will give this error:

make: *** No targets.  Stop.

To give make something to do, a "do nothing" target called all is provided like this:

.PHONY: all
all: ;@:

The .PHONY keyword specifies targets that will always be built, whether or not they exist. In this case, that is the all target. This target is written in the alternate form for brevity:

target: ;command

This means that whenever the target needs to be built, make will execute the command following the semicolon. By default, make echoes each command that it executes. To suppress this, @ may be used before the command. The colon (:) command just exits with non-error status.

How to Run the Solution

To run this program, download and install the latest GNU Make using these instructions:

• Windows
• For Linux, see "How to Download" section
• Mac

Download a copy of Hello World in GNU Make, and run this command:

make -sf hello-world.mk