How "make" app knows default target to build if no target is specified?

Question

Hello

Most linux apps are compiled with

make
make install clean

As i understood, make takes names of build targets as arguments. so "install" is a target that copies some files and after that "clean" is a target that removes temporary files.

But what target "make" will build if no arguments are specified (first command in my example)?

Answer 1

By default, it begins by processing the first target that does not begin with a '.', to do that, it may have to process other targets - specifically, ones the first target depends on. The GNU make manual covers all this stuff, and is a suprisingly easy and informative read.