If so, these would not be in your clean rule. Make offers a number of tricks to avoid editing repetitive rules into the makefile. I've written a makefile for the examples directory which illustrates a few of the more useful of these devices. The notes to follow refer to this makefile. Make variables are analogous to macro definitions for the C preprocessor.
Variable definitions can be recursive.
Also, the implicit rules, about to be discussed, use these variables. I've used implicit rules to maintain the examples directory using this makefile . So you can't use the default link command, which doesn't include the right libraries. Therefore you have to write your own link command, which is no big deal as you can see. You can see that the right thing will happen with these substitutions.