Glad you're enjoying the videos :^) Cheers, --Nick

Having a file named "clean" is just one example of how the existence of any file with the same as the target of some rule will prevent some recipe from running. The file could be named "clean" (like this example), it could be "install", it could "help". The key point is that there are rules that we want to run the recipe for with some target name, but that rule doesn't actually generate a file named . That's where .PHONY comes in, to express that it's a phony target, and to always for the recipe to run for that role, regardless of any file with the same name as . Cheers, --Nick