About once a week I get an email from someone random asking a question about GNU Make. I do my best to answer and figured it might be helpful for others if I shared these questions and my answers. So, here goes. This one starts with a Princess Leia style appeal: I stumbled across your name when googling for help on a GNUmake related problem, hope you have the time to look at it as you are my last hope. I have the following problem in my Makefile: $(LIBDIR)/libfoo.a: $(filter $(OBJDIR)/foo/%,$(OBJECTS)) $(LIBDIR)/libbar.a: $(filter $(OBJDIR)/bar/%,$(OBJECTS)) $(LIBDIR)/libbaz.a: $(filter $(OBJDIR)/baz/%,$(OBJECTS)) $(LIBDIR)/%.a: ar -r [email protected] $^ ranlib [email protected] so far, so good - it works as expected. The only problem is, that in the real world it's not just foo, bar and baz for me and I hate having to maintain the list manually. What I would like to do is something like this: $(LIBDIR)/lib%.a: $(filter $(OBJDIR)/%/%,$(OBJECTS)) ar -r [email protected] $^ ranlib [email protected] but