Automatic generation of make dependencies

In the UNIX environment, it is standard practice to use the make program to keep a system of interrelated modules up to date. When text files contain so‐called include statements referring to additional text files whose contents are to replace the statements, it soon becomes impractical, in a growing system, to manually maintain all make dependencies implied by these references. Therefore, the dependencies are often generated automatically from extracted include statements by various methods. However, the methods we have seen in use are too simplistic and either generate the wrong set of dependencies, or give only partial support. This paper describes an algorithm that can be used to generate make dependencies implied by include statements from a wide class of include mechanisms.