BSD make != GNU make

While working on a little home networking project, I found myself having to write a Makefile in a FreeBSD environment.

Having written only GNU Makefiles over the course of my life, I was surprised to find that my recipes just … didn’t work.

Some resources that helped me make the jump to writing BSD style Makefiles are:

• The make(1) man page that ships with FreeBSD. It’s surprisingly thorough, but difficult to search through if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for.
• This FreeBSD mailing list post quoting GNU make’s summary of differences from BSD make.
• And PMake: A Tutorial, hosted on FreeBSD.org.