[c] How do I make a simple makefile for gcc on Linux?

I have three files: program.c, program.h and headers.h.

program.c includes program.h and headers.h.

I need to compile this on Linux using gcc compiler. I'm not sure how to do this. Netbeans created one for me, but it's empty.

This question is related to c gcc makefile

The answer is


Depending on the number of headers and your development habits, you may want to investigate gccmakedep. This program examines your current directory and adds to the end of the makefile the header dependencies for each .c/cpp file. This is overkill when you have 2 headers and one program file. However, if you have 5+ little test programs and you are editing one of 10 headers, you can then trust make to rebuild exactly those programs which were changed by your modifications.


The simplest make file can be

all : test

test : test.o
        gcc -o test test.o 

test.o : test.c
        gcc -c test.c

clean :
        rm test *.o

all: program
program.o: program.h headers.h

is enough. the rest is implicit


For example this simple Makefile should be sufficient:

CC=gcc 
CFLAGS=-Wall

all: program
program: program.o
program.o: program.c program.h headers.h

clean:
    rm -f program program.o
run: program
    ./program

Note there must be <tab> on the next line after clean and run, not spaces.

UPDATE Comments below applied


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