How to convert a makefile into readable code?

I download开发者_Go百科ed a set of source code for a program in a book and I got a makefile. I am quite new to Linux, and I want to know whether there is any way I can see the actual source code written in C?

Or what exactly am I to do with it?

It sounds like you may not have downloaded the complete source code from the book web site. As mentioned previously, a Makefile is only the instructions for building the source code, and the source code is normally found in additional files with names ending in .c and .h. Perhaps you could look around the book web site for more files to download?

Or, since presumably the book web site is public, let us know which one it is and somebody will be happy to point you in the right direction.

A Makefile does not contain any source itself. It is simply a list of instructions in a special format which specifies what commands should be run, and in what order, to build your program. If you want to see where the source is, your Makefile will likely contain many "filename.c"'s and "filename.h"'s. You can use grep to find all the instances of ".c" and ".h" in the file, which should correspond to the C source and header files in the project. The following command should do the trick:

grep -e '\.[ch]' Makefile

To use the Makefile to build your project, simply typing make should do something reasonable. If that doesn't do what you want, look for unindented lines ending in a colon; these are target names, and represent different arguments you can specify after "make" to build a particular part of your project, or build it in a certain way. For instance, make install, make all, and make debug are common targets.

You probably have GNU Make on your system; much more information on Makefiles can be found here.

It looks like you also need to download the SB-AllSource.zip file. Then use make (with the Makefile that you've already downloaded) to build.