This file documents the GNU Make utility, which determines automatically which pieces of a large program need to be recompiled, and issues the commands to recompile them. Inc. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Free Software Foundation. Sometimes a file can be made by a sequence of implicit rules.
Intermediate files are remade using their rules just like all other files.
But intermediate files are treated differently in two ways. The first difference is what happens if the intermediate file does not exist. It won't bother updating B, or the ultimate target, unless some dependency of B is newer than that target or there is some other reason to update that target. Ordinarily, a file cannot be intermediate if it is mentioned in the makefile as a target or dependency. This takes effect even if the file is mentioned explicitly in some other way.