Yes, but you have to work a little bit for it. If your rule that builds .o files from .c/.cpp files uses the one of the dependency-generating flags to GCC (opt

Yes, but you have to work a little bit for it. If your rule that builds .o files from .c/.cpp files uses the one of the dependency-generating flags to GCC (options beginning with -M), GCC will create an alternate or additional (depending on the flag) make-compatible file that describes what files were included during the build. If you then include these files in your Makefile with the 'include' directive, then you'll get the behavior you're looking for. Implementing it correctly can be a little tricky, but once you understand how to do it it's not too bad. As I recall there used to be some subtle issues that required some post-processing of the GCC-generated dependency files to avoid a problem when header files were renamed or removed (foo.c included foo.h, so a dependency was generated; later foo.c was modified to not require foo.h, and foo.h was removed, but the build still thinks it's required to build) -- it looks like GCC now has a -MP option to add phony empty rules for all dependencies, allowing make to power through these.