Make is a general purpose workflow program, usually used for compilation. But it can be used for anything.

When you do something like "make all", the make program executes a rule named "all" from a file in current directory named "Makefile". This rule usually calls the compiler to compile some source code into binaries.

When you do "make install", the make program takes the binaries from the previous step and copies them into some appropriate locations so that they can be accessed. Unlike on Windows, installation just requires copying some libraries and executables and there is no registry requirement as such. In short, "make install" just copies compiled files into appropriate locations.

make is a GNU command, so the only way you can get it on Windows is installing a Windows version like the one provided by GNUWin32. Anyway, there are several options for getting that:

1. Directly download from Make for Windows

2. Using Chocolatey. First, you need to install this package manager. Once installed, you simply need to install make (you may need to run it in an elevated/administrator command prompt):

   choco install make
   

3. Another recommended option is installing a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL or WSL 2), so you'll have a Linux distribution of your choice embedded in Windows 10, where you'll be able to install make, gcc, and all the tools you need to build C programs.

4. For older Windows versions (Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, or Windows 7 with msvcrt.dll) you can use GnuWin32.

An outdated alternative was MinGW, but the project seems to be abandoned, so it's better to go for one of the previous choices.

Normally in UNIX systems the headers go to $PREFIX/include, library files go to $PREFIX/lib, where PREFIX can be /usr or /usr/local or whatever. In linux, if you install your library to these directories it will be found by gcc as you want with just gcc my_source.c -lunixlib.

The PREFIX environment variable is commonly used by various build tools to supply that prefix.

I would also recommend to use DESTDIR variable, it is used by Debian packaging tools at least.

So, the makefile would be like:

# PREFIX is environment variable, but if it is not set, then set default value
ifeq ($(PREFIX),)
    PREFIX := /usr/local
endif

install: unixlib.a
    install -d $(DESTDIR)$(PREFIX)/lib/
    install -m 644 unixlib.a $(DESTDIR)$(PREFIX)/lib/
    install -d $(DESTDIR)$(PREFIX)/include/
    install -m 644 unixlib.h $(DESTDIR)$(PREFIX)/include/

Note, the install -d ... is used just in case if directory does not exist in the supplied DESTDIR for example.

You can also have a look at my non-recursive template for make to find some hints: https://github.com/cppfw/prorab/blob/master/src/prorab.mk

The OP ask long time ago, but I will guess it can be useful for others.

Since your make install command try to install files in directory requiring root privileges (ex: /usr/local/bin) you can either:

• Become root before launching your command (as you stated in your description: using sudo for example)

OR

• Install it in another directory that do not require specific privilege. For this purpose you can use a specific parameter named 'DESTDIR' that is usually supported in makefile, so that your command looks like:

  make DESTDIR=/home/myuser/my_dest_dir install

  This is named Staged Installs.

Run the command:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Chances are you will need things like gcc to actually do the building so you might as well install those as well. The build-essential package will install other tools used along with make.

install not only copies files but also changes its ownership and permissions and optionally removes debugging symbols from executables. It combines cp with chown, chmod and strip. It's a convenient higher-level tool to that accomplishes a common sequence of elementary tasks.

An advantage of install over cp for installing executables is that if the target already exists, it removes the target file and creates a new one. This gets rid of any current properties such as access control lists and capabilities, which can be seen both as an upside and as a downside. When updating executables, if there are running instances of this executable, they keep running unaffected. In contrast, cp updates the file in place if there is one. On most Unix variants, this fails with the error EBUSY¹ if the target is a running executable; on some it can cause the target to crash because it loads code sections dynamically and modifying the file causes nonsensical code to be loaded.

install is a BSD command (added in 4.2BSD, i.e. in the early 1980s). It has not been adopted by POSIX.

¹ “Text file busy”. In this context, “text file” means “binary executable file”, for obscure historical reasons.

./configure is a program that looks at your system configuration and builds some of the system dependencies for your program. make is a program that looks at your Makefile (which was probably built by configure) and uses the rules in there to build your program. The Makefile can have multiple "targets" which are rule sets to do different things - the default is usually just to compile and link your program. When you say make with no arguments, it runs the default target. When you say make install you're running the install target, which usually installs the binaries or libraries built by the default target in their final locations. clean is another common Makefile target that deletes all the generated files like intermediate object files.