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Certain names have special meanings if they appear as targets.
.PHONY
The dependencies of the special target .PHONY are considered to
be phony targets. When it is time to consider such a target,
make will run its commands unconditionally, regardless of
whether a file with that name exists or what its last-modification
time is. See section Phony Targets.
.SUFFIXES
The dependencies of the special target .SUFFIXES are the list
of suffixes to be used in checking for suffix rules.
See section Old-Fashioned Suffix Rules.
.DEFAULT
The commands specified for .DEFAULT are used for any target for
which no rules are found (either explicit rules or implicit rules).
See section Defining Last-Resort Default Rules. If .DEFAULT commands are specified, every
file mentioned as a dependency, but not as a target in a rule, will have
these commands executed on its behalf. See section Implicit Rule Search Algorithm.
.PRECIOUS
The targets which .PRECIOUS depends on are given the following
special treatment: if make is killed or interrupted during the
execution of their commands, the target is not deleted.
@xref{Interrupts, ,Interrupting or Killing Also, if the target is an intermediate file, it will not be deleted}make}.
after it is no longer needed, as is normally done.
See section Chains of Implicit Rules.
You can also list the target pattern of an implicit rule (such as
`%.o') as a dependency file of the special target .PRECIOUS
to preserve intermediate files created by rules whose target patterns
match that file's name.
.IGNORE
Simply by being mentioned as a target, .IGNORE says to ignore
errors in execution of commands. The dependencies and commands for
.IGNORE are not meaningful.
`.IGNORE' exists for historical compatibility. Since
.IGNORE affects every command in the makefile, it is not very
useful; we recommend you use the more selective ways to ignore errors
in specific commands. See section Errors in Commands.
.SILENT
Simply by being mentioned as a target, .SILENT says not to
print commands before executing them. The dependencies and commands
for .SILENT are not meaningful.
`.SILENT' exists for historical compatibility. We recommend you
use the more selective ways to silence specific commands.
See section Command Echoing. If you want to silence all commands
for a particular run of make, use the `-s' or
`--silent' option (see section Summary of Options).
.EXPORT_ALL_VARIABLES
Simply by being mentioned as a target, this tells make to
export all variables to child processes by default.
See section Communicating Variables to a Sub-make}.
Any defined implicit rule suffix also counts as a special target if it appears as a target, and so does the concatenation of two suffixes, such as `.c.o'. These targets are suffix rules, an obsolete way of defining implicit rules (but a way still widely used). In principle, any target name could be special in this way if you break it in two and add both pieces to the suffix list. In practice, suffixes normally begin with `.', so these special target names also begin with `.'. See section Old-Fashioned Suffix Rules.
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