Table of Contents        Previous topic       Next topic       

PROGRAM MAINTENANCE UTILITY->Description Blocks

A description block consists of a dependency line followed by a list of commands.

The format for a description block is:

<target> <target> ... : <dependent> <dependent> ...
 <command>
 <command>

where    <target> is the name of a target file
and    <dependent> is the name of a dependent file.

and as an example:

code : file1.obj file2.obj file3.obj  dependency line
    link file1 file2 file3;  command line
              
where code is the only target file and file1.obj, file2.obj and file3.obj are the dependent files.

The statements of dependency lines must start at the beginning of the line with no preceding blank spaces.  The statements of command lines must be preceded by at least one blank space.

If any of the dependent files are newer than the target files, the commands following the dependency line are executed.

A command can be any command or program that can be executed from a DOS command line.

If a description block does not contain any commands then MAKE looks for an inference rule that matches the dependency.