1.14. Obtaining GNU make
Problem
You want to obtain and install the GNU make utility, useful for building libraries and executables from source code.
Solution
The solution depends on your operating system.
Windows
While you can obtain prebuilt binaries for GNU make from several locations, to get the most out of GNU make it should be installed as part of a Unix-like environment. I recommend using either Cygwin or MSYS, which is a part of the MinGW project.
Tip
Cygwin and MinGW are described in Recipe 1.1.
If you installed Cygwin, as described in Recipe 1.1, you already have GNU make. To run it from the Cygwin shell, simply run the command make.
To install MSYS, begin by installing MinGW, as described in Recipe Recipe 1.1. A future version of the MinGW installer may give you the option of installing MSYS automatically. For now, follow these additional steps.
First, from the MinGW homepage, http://www.mingw.org, go to the MinGW download area and download the latest stable version of the MSYS installation program. The name of the installation program should be MSYS-<version>.exe.
Next, run the installation program. You will be asked to specify the location of your MinGW installation and the location where MSYS should be installed. When the installation program completes, the MSYS installation directory should contain a file named msys.bat. Running this script will display the MSYS shell, a port of the bash shell from which you can run GNU make and other mingw programs such as g++, ar, ranlib ...