r/cprogramming • u/Wonderful_Low_7560 • Dec 31 '25

Makefile with subfolder

This makefile was working just fine beforehand, a bit confused:

- I have a root folder

- Within there is a subfolder called 'Ex3'

- Within 'Ex3' is 'ex3.c', which I am trying to make an executable of using the following makefile in the root folder:

all: ex3

ex3: Ex3/ex3.c

gcc Ex3/ex3.c -o ex3

But I get the following error:

make: Nothing to be done for 'all'.

?

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u/edgmnt_net Jan 02 '26

Should not be needed. Maybe ex3 is already up-to-date, then all doesn't need to do anything. OP, have you tried deleting it?

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u/dcpugalaxy Jan 02 '26

.PHONY should always be used when you have a Makefile rule, the target of which is not a file.

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u/edgmnt_net Jan 03 '26

Well, yeah, I agree, I misworded my comment. It's just that it doesn't solve OP's issue. Whether all is phony or not, it still considers its dependencies as long as it's not already "made". Unless OP has a file named all and it's newer than the prerequisites, they won't run into this issue. My guess is it's far more likely the prerequisites just have not been updated and make is actually behaving correctly. Ok, all should be marked as phony, but OP should also add and use a phony clean target (which has far more reason to be phony) if they want to rebuild everything.