"The make program is a very flexible and powerful tool. Most of us have some familiarity with it from using it in the compilation process of the Linux kernel and other source codes that for whatever reason, we choose to compile rather than install the binary version. But what is the make command and what else can it do besides compile programs?"
"The canonical_documentation (authoritative reference) to the make command is the gnu documentation. If you do decide to read through all of that, you will know alot about make and probably be able to imagine various situations in which it could be used productively. Here are the ideas that I had for using make after reading the docs."
"I don't know what your specific needs are but when I create a tex file or latex file, I don't want to have to issue a bunch of commands to get printable output but that is exactly what you have to do if you are doing things from the command line. Let's take a look at a simple example designed to relieve me of this duty..."
