RJT> I was surprised that this went the whole way through the link 
 RJT> process and everything and ended up giving me an 
 RJT> executable,  I thought it would've stopped before 
 RJT> it got to that point.
 
You can read the HTML documentation on GNU's web site, and it probably
comes with Make as info files. 
 
Unfortunately, the documentation is very good at explaining syntax, but
very poor at explaining the action->consequence train. The best way to
figure out what implicit rules are being queried for a particular rule is
to use "make -p" when building a file, and read through the (very
long and verbose) output.
 
Or, if you have specific questions, you can ask me. :) I have a LOT of
practice building fairly esoteric Makefiles, and my philosphy with Make is
to specify as few rules as possible -- leaving almost everything up to
implicit rules (either stock or user-specified).
 
Wes

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