Re: Post 3.81 $? handling

[John Graham-Cumming]

Paul D. Smith wrote:
>   $ cat makefile
>
>   foo: bar ; @echo "\$$? = $?"
>   bar: ;
>
>   $ touch foo
>
>   $ make
>   $? = 

OK.  I see that works, now why?  I'm assuming that the difference 
between bar: and bar: ; is that GNU Make thinks that it's updated bar in 
the latter case, but in the former it does not.

What I'm not sure about is why $? contains bar if I do bar:  How does 
that come about?  Is that because bar: is a 'FORCE' target and hence GNU 
 Make is pretending it's up to date and hence it gets put into $?

John.