Editing Make (software) (section)

===Suffix rules===

Suffix rules have "targets" with names in the form {{code|.FROM.TO}} and are used to launch actions based on file extension. In the command lines of suffix rules, POSIX specifies<ref name=posix-macros /> that the internal macro {{code|$<}} refers to the first prerequisite and {{code|$@}} refers to the target. In this example, which converts any HTML file into text, the shell redirection token {{code|>}} is part of the command line, whereas {{code|$<}} is a macro referring to the HTML file:

<syntaxhighlight lang="make">
.SUFFIXES: .txt .html

# From .html to .txt
.html.txt:
	lynx -dump $<   >   $@
</syntaxhighlight>

When called from the command line, the example above expands:

<syntaxhighlight lang="console">
$ make -n file.txt
lynx -dump file.html > file.txt
</syntaxhighlight>