make: Nothing to be done for `all'

Question

I am going through an eg pgm to create a make file.

http://mrbook.org/tutorials/make/

My folder eg_make_creation contains the following files,

Answer 1

I arrived at this peculiar, hard-to-debug error through a different route. My trouble ended up being that I was using a pattern rule in a build step when the target and the dependency were located in distinct directories. Something like this:

foo/apple.o: bar/apple.c $(FOODEPS)

%.o: %.c
    $(CC) $< -o $@

I had several dependencies set up this way, and was trying to use one pattern recipe for them all. Clearly, a single substitution for "%" isn't going to work here. I made explicit rules for each dependency, and I found myself back among the puppies and unicorns!

foo/apple.o: bar/apple.c $(FOODEPS)
    $(CC) $< -o $@

Hope this helps someone!