make: Nothing to be done for `all'

Sometimes "Nothing to be done for all" error can be caused by spaces before command in makefile rule instead of tab. Please ensure that you use tabs instead of spaces inside of your rules.

all:
<\t>$(CC) $(CFLAGS) ...

instead of

all:
    $(CC) $(CFLAGS) ...

Please see the GNU make manual for the rule syntax description: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html#Rule-Syntax

Remove the hello file from your folder and try again.

The all target depends on the hello target. The hello target first tries to find the corresponding file in the filesystem. If it finds it and it is up to date with the dependent files—there is nothing to do.

When you just give make, it makes the first rule in your makefile, i.e "all". You have specified that "all" depends on "hello", which depends on main.o, factorial.o and hello.o. So 'make' tries to see if those files are present.

If they are present, 'make' sees if their dependencies, e.g. main.o has a dependency main.c, have changed. If they have changed, make rebuilds them, else skips the rule. Similarly it recursively goes on building the files that have changed and finally runs the top most command, "all" in your case to give you a executable, 'hello' in your case.

If they are not present, make blindly builds everything under the rule.

Coming to your problem, it isn't an error but 'make' is saying that every dependency in your makefile is up to date and it doesn't need to make anything!

Make is behaving correctly. hello already exists and is not older than the .c files, and therefore there is no more work to be done. There are four scenarios in which make will need to (re)build:

• If you modify one of your .c files, then it will be newer than hello, and then it will have to rebuild when you run make.
• If you delete hello, then it will obviously have to rebuild it
• You can force make to rebuild everything with the -B option. make -B all
• make clean all will delete hello and require a rebuild. (I suggest you look at @Mat's comment about rm -f *.o hello

I think you missed a tab in 9th line. The line following all:hello must be a blank tab. Make sure that you have a blank tab in 9th line. It will make the interpreter understand that you want to use default recipe for makefile.