I recommend you spend some time learning how to use make before you spend a great deal of time with your plan. If you do so, once you start trying to rewrite i

I recommend you spend some time learning how to use make before you spend a great deal of time with your plan. If you do so, once you start trying to rewrite it in a shell script, you will discover pretty quickly why you don't want to. If you don't spend that time, it will take you a lot longer to discover why you shouldn't rewrite it. Either way is likely to have the same result, but one will take less time ;-) To be fair, there are other dependency tools around, but make is a really good starting place to learn what it's about and why you want to use something quite robust. Many people dislike make, but personally I haven't used anything that was substantially better.