Makefile question with no answer?

[jim.mcginness at att.net]

Steve, we may be misunderstanding what you want to do in part because what you've asked for seems to misunderstand what a makefile does.

Take a look at your dependency line for "clean" for instance. Chances are that there are no dependencies listed for it. The action list for "clean" is simply going to be taken unilaterally whenever the "clean" target is requested. There's no other place where you can add hidden or global dependencies to "clean".

You haven't said this, but what it sounds like you may want an _action_ to occur whenever make processes this makefile. There could possibly be a way to do this, depending on the flavor of make.