On Wed, 26 Jul 2023 01:37:11 -0400 (EDT) > ... I see that rm, which was on the list of directly invokable utilities > with cp, nonetheless has an RM namesake, which contains the very much > conventional, but non-obvious and misleading, -f. AR is there alright but, > had the OP chosen INSTALL as their example, there'd be more of a case to > answer. A cross-reference to > https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Implicit-Variables.html > might help to explain what can be relied upon without Autotools or such.
If you want to use $(CP) or $(INSTALL) in your Makefile you will need to assign those variables yourself. Doing so might be a good idea the day when someonne wants to port your Makefile to another system, maybe "cp" is called something like "copy" on that system. If so, it is a lot easier to only change the assignment of $(CP) at a single row in the Makefile than to replace "cp" in several rules. regards Henrik
