Fortunately, BSD-based systems like FreeBSD come with some very powerful ones as part of the system. One very good example of this is the FreeBSD ports system. A check is made to see if the source code for this port is already on the system. The checksum for the source is calculated and compared it with one for a known, good, copy of the source. This is to make sure that the source was not corrupted while in transit.
Any special configuration needed for the source is done.
The source code for the program is compiled. We now have a compiled version of the program. The secret lies in the last line, which tells make to look in the system makefile called bsd.port.mk . More advanced uses of make Make is a very powerful tool, and can do much more than the simple example above shows. Unfortunately, there are several different versions of make , and they all differ considerably.