RE: why are all prerequisites timestamps checked, even after one is found to be newer than target??

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, 2009-12-14 at 10:32 -0800, Mark Galeck (CW) wrote:
> I see.  I grepped $? and it seems to me there is no way to prevent
> that variable from being populated, so all the timestamps will always
> be checked, nothing I can do about, right?

There is no way to disable the population of any of the automatic
variables, no: they are automatically populated for every target before
the target recipe is evaluated.

I guess maybe Windows is different, but on POSIX systems the cost of
doing the extra "stat" calls is not significant enough to try to make
this behavior more complex just to avoid them.