GNU make

A target can also be the name of an action to carry out, such as ‘clean’ (see Phony Targets).

By default, make starts with the first target (not targets whose names start with ‘.’). This is called the default goal.

It is standard practice for every makefile to have a variable named objects, OBJECTS, objs, OBJS, obj, or OBJ which is a list of all object file names.

.PHONY In Makefile

A phony target is simply a target that is always out-of-date, so whenever you ask make <phony_target>, it will run, independent from the state of the file system.