Re: make repeated goals repeatedly?

[Paul D. Smith]

%% David Boyce <address@hidden> writes:

  db> I'm looking for clarification on what _should_ happen when you
  db> specify the same target(s) repeatedly on the command line.

  db> Which could be taken to imply the behavior (clean twice, build
  db> twice) I expected. This is not a huge problem - I'm just wondering
  db> if there's history or a spec in back of it.

I don't know about a standard, but I'm pretty sure all makes behave like
this.  I think the theory is that there's some "meta-target" which is
really the one make runs, and is prerequisites are the ones on the
command line; so:

    <meta>: clean all clean all

Which obviously only builds "clean" and "all" once, because once it's
been built make assumes it's up to date... and if it isn't, doing it
again won't help.

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