mk: a successor to make
Andrew Hume · W. B. Saunders Company eBooks · 1990
Mk is an efficient general tool for describing and maintaining dependencies between files or programs. Mk is styled on, and largely compatible with, the UNIX† tool make . The major advantages of mk over make are executing recipes in parallel, using pattern-matching metarules rather than suffix transformation rules, and deriving dependencies by transitive closure on all rules. Mk runs anywhere from 2 to 30 times faster than make . This report describes mk by means of an evolving example. Other sections summarize the differences between mk and make and discuss the principles underlying mk ’s design.