BTW: I'm looking for a way to call this every time make is called without changing something in the upper dirs. If make all is entered, my method doesn't work. How?I don't know your code, so this answer may not be relevant. Your file xversion.h depends on ".", it is quite unusual. I propose you to try the following: .PHONY: xversion.h xversion.h: $(SHELL) xversion.sh
I tried .PHONY, but maybe not correct.
However, I'm not sure it is good to have a .h rebuilt everytime... it may rebuild a lot of other files.
That's intentional. It's included only in one small c-file. I want the version-date to be set to the last change, not the build-date. Works already when not 'all' is given to make.
-- Helmut Karlowski