Automation and Make

Discussion

Make can build dependencies in parallel sub-processes, via its -j flag which specifies the number of sub-processes to use e.g.

$ make -j 4 analysis.tar.gz

For more information see the GNU Make manual chapter on Parallel Execution.

Blog articles and tutorials on automating data analysis using Make:

minimal make by Karl Broman. A minimal tutorial on using Make with R and LaTeX to automate data analysis, visualisation and paper preparation. This page has links to Makefiles for many of his papers.
Why Use Make by Mike Bostock. An example of using Make to download and convert data.
Makefiles for R/LaTeX projects by Rob Hyndman. Another example of using Make with R and LaTeX.
GNU Make for Reproducible Data Analysis by Zachary Jones. Using Make with Python and LaTeX.
Shaun Jackman’s Using Make to increase Automation & Reproducibility lesson, and accompanying example.