[nrclark]

Make recipes are literally shell scripts.

Make is designed to take a bunch of little shell scripts, give each one an arbitrary name (which can be the output files if you want, but doesn't have to be), and run them. Dependencies are run first, if your script has any of them. Files can satisfy dependencies unless you tell Make that they don't.

It's really not different from a shell script with a bunch of functions that you can call by name, except that Make has already provided the scaffolding for you (including dependency-awareness, tree walking, parallel execution, etc)