Bug in the make program (?!)

[Bradley White]

In article <110 at cui.UUCP>, dimitri at cui.UUCP (KONSTANTAS Dimitri) writes:
> Using the make program, I came to case where make behaves differently
> when executed with the -n option and without.

It should not be surprising that "make" and "make -n" can do different
things.  "make -n" assumes that an "a: b c" rule actually makes "a" out
of "b" and "c", and that it does it ``now'', whereas "make" can stat()
"a" after the commands are run to see if it was really made.  In
general, rules that don't make their targets (like those given), or
rules that try to be smart about making their target even though the
dependencies are out of date (for example, trying to detect benign
changes), will always confuse "make -n".
-- 
Bradley White <bww at cs.cmu.edu>         +1-412-268-3060
CMU Computer Science Department  40 26'33"N 79 56'48"W