Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Getting make file errors
Message-ID: <13847@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 13 Sep 90 18:43:40 GMT
References: <282@camdev.UUCP>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 13

In article <282@camdev.UUCP> sscott@mot.com (Steve Scott,6317) writes:
>***Error code 28

Those are normally the exit status codes from the subprocesses
("shell commands" in the rules for dependencies).  The convention
is that a command returns a non-zero exit status when it is unable
to do its assigned task correctly.  "Make" honors this by reporting
the (one-byte) reported exit status of the failing subcommand; you
can tell "make" to ignore the error after reporting it by prefixing
the command in the Makefile with a "-", but most often there is a
genuine problem (such as telling the command to operate on a
nonexistent file), and in that case you should fix whatever it is
that caused the command to fail.