Re: alternative uses of "make"

Miles H. Lasater (miles.lasater@yale.edu)
Wed, 3 Feb 1999 14:25:08 -0500 (EST)

On Wed, 3 Feb 1999, Ken Lai wrote:

> (For those who don't know what "make" is, please look up the man page.)
>
> The ability of make files to check dependencies and freshness of files
> make it a nice tool to use for constructing a website, updating the
> html files automatically.
>
> The C pre-processor could be used to do the include's and define's, and
> it could be set as the default "compiler" with CC=cpp.

Interesting that you should mention this. I have a similar question about
maintaining websites.

I would like to be able to create a database of information that could
easily be merged with a html template file to create a large amount of
pages dynamically. Not dynamically, in the sense of cgi, on-the-fly
on-demand page creation, but dynamically in the sense of a batch process,
perhaps run by a cron job a couple of times a day that would update the
site from the database.

I suspect that there are standard solutions to this, but I don't know
where to start looking for them. Any help would be great.

-Miles Lasater