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Comment by dfox | Hacker News Reader

Explicitly doing 'make' is redundant for makefiles generated by any version of automake I've ever used. Dependencies are setup correctly so that install also builds everything that it installs and isn't already uptodate (I'm not sure whether 'install' also explicitly depends on 'all')

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The usual reason to separate them is that if you're installing to a prefix that needs root privileges to write to, then you'll be doing something like:

    ./configure && make && sudo make install

If you do this instead:

    ./configure && sudo make install

...then the compiler toolchain gets invoked as root and all the intermediate build products end up owned by root.

There is another reason. `make -j4 && make install' would be faster than just `make install' (multi-process vs. single-process).

You can do `make -j4 install`. Works as intended.

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