Just to review the terminology, this is the structure of a makefile 'rule':
target: dependencies ...
commands
...
This is the makefile I've written:
CC = mpicc
SHAREDLIB = libfmd.so
CFLAGS = -fPIC -Wall -Wno-unused-result -O3 -fopenmp
LFLAGS = -lm -fopenmp -lgsl -lgslcblas
OBJS = $(patsubst %.c,%.o,$(wildcard *.c))
.PHONY: all shared clean
all: shared
shared: $(SHAREDLIB)
$(SHAREDLIB): depend.mk $(OBJS)
$(CC) $(OBJS) -shared -o $@ $(LFLAGS)
depend.mk: *.c *.h
$(CC) -MM *.c > depend.mk
-include depend.mk
clean:
rm -f *.o libfmd.so depend.mk
When the folder is clean, and I enter make clean, the following lines are shown:
mpicc -MM *.c > depend.mk
rm -f *.o libfmd.so depend.mk
It seems to me that -include depend.mk in addition to including depend.mk, executes the rule that depend.mk is its target. I'd like to stop this behavior.
You are correct. See How Makefiles are Remade in the documentation.
There is no way to prevent this behavior: if there's a rule that creates an included makefile, make will always rebuild it if it's out of date, then re-invoke itself to read the latest version.
The question is, why do you want to avoid it? Maybe if you explained the behavior you are actually looking for at a higher level we could help. As you have it here it's possible for .o files to be created without any depend.mk file created, then a compile fails, you modify a header file to fix it, but since the depend.mk file doesn't exist when you re-run make the source files are not rebuilt properly.
If you want to get accurate handling of C/C++ dependencies with GCC you might take a look at Auto-Dependency Generation.