anything special about "." prefixed targets other than default?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i'm looking at someone else's Makefile, and it is replete with
targets whose names begin with a period. i'm aware of the property
that such targets will not be considered as the default, but once you
define a few early targets, is there any value in continuing to have
period-prefixed targets?

  in this Makefile, there are a number of "paired" targets such as:

  clean_mystuff:
  .clean_mystuff_fail:

which seems to suggest some kind of pattern, but i have no idea what
it might be.

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                         http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn:                               http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
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