What are the other uses of the "make" command?

Question

A sysadmin teacher told me one day that I should learn to use "make" because I could use it for a lot of other things that just triggering complilations.

I never got the chance to talk longer about it. Do you have any good example ?

As a bonus, isn't it this tool deprecated, and what are modern alternatives (for the compilation purpose and others) ?

Answer 1

One excellent thing make can be used for besides compilation is LaTeX. If you're doing any serious work with LaTeX, you'll find make very handy because of the need to re-interpret .tex files several times when using BibTex or tables of contents.

Make is definitely not deprecated. Although there are different ways of doing the same thing (batch files on Windows, shell scripts on Linux) make works the best, IMHO.