Re: file unexpectedly removed

[Paul Smith]

On Thu, 2016-05-12 at 23:50 -0700, Perry Hutchison wrote:
> While looking into something else, I ran into a case where make (3.82)
> removes an intermediate target file after building the final target.
> I had not expected this, and could not find any mention of such 
> behavior in the manual -- nor in the list archives -- although it's 
> certainly possible that I didn't use the right search terms.  Is this 
> in fact normal, or have I perhaps found a bug?

It is expected, and documented:

http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Chained-Rules.html

> The second difference is that if make does create b in order to update
> something else, it deletes b later on after it is no longer needed.
> Therefore, an intermediate file which did not exist before make also
> does not exist after make. make reports the deletion to you by
> printing a ‘rm -f’ command showing which file it is deleting.