GNU Make tries the following names, in order: GNUmakefile, makefile and Makefile.
Makefile has the advantages:
- appears at the top of ls by default because ASCII uppercase comes before ASCII lowercase
- more conventional
makefile has the advantages:
- sticks to the other widespread convention of naming everything lowercase
You can also chose the file explicitly with -f.
We often need pieces of makefiles that will be included in other make files.
The most common naming pattern for those is:
include.mk
.mk is recognized as makefile by most editors.
Chose a makefile explicitly:
make -f anything.mk
Let make run in 5 threads:
make -j5
Be warned: this will make standard output of all threads mix up so the stdout will be meaningless.
Also, this may break your makefiles, since in a rule like:
all: a b c
a, b, and c are run in parallel, it it might be the case that c must run only after a and b.