I am writing a multiple-filed program right now, and apparently running only ‘make’ (as one would intuitively think needs to be done in most situations) for some reason causes my program to fail. I guess I can provide more detail of the problem, but the important thing is that it does run when using ‘make clean’. So I was wondering if anyone knew the general rule of thumb for running ‘make clean’ instead of just ‘make’c++buildsmake
Alek RichterEnlightened
You run make clean in two situations – when you want to package up the source code (and therefore don’t need/want the built objects) OR when you have some reason to believe that the built objects are bad.
In your case, you’re using ‘make clean’ to fix a problem that is likely the result of a buggy Makefile. Something in there is not re-compiling when it should, and that’s causing the output binary to be bad.
There are many reasons that could happen, depending on the complexity of your project, and how you’ve used make, but the gist of it is: you need to spend some time debugging your Makefile.