I might be wrong, but I think make does not work the way you think it does: First of all files you write to disk are not actually written to the harddrive immed

I might be wrong, but I think make does not work the way you think it does: First of all files you write to disk are not actually written to the harddrive immediately there are several caches in between, secondly if make has to process a file in multiple steps it will probably use unix pipes and won't write out intermediary files to disk.