Make “make” default to “make -j 8”

Question

Is there a way that I can make

$ make

default to:

$ make -j 8

?

Answer 1

If you are using the command line you can do:

alias make='make -j 8'

This will be temporary, to make it permanent you need to add it to .bashrc

Read here: http://www.linfo.org/make_alias_permanent.html

Answer 2

If you're using GNU make:

$ make --version
GNU Make 4.2.1
Built for x86_64-alpine-linux-musl

...then I found that GNUMAKEFLAGS seems to work:

export GNUMAKEFLAGS=-j8
make

Disclaimer, I'm a n00b with the C toolchain so sorry if this isn't portable. It's working on Alpine Linux 3.8 (in Docker) though.