If you use several levels of recursive make invocations, the
‘-w’ or ‘--print-directory’ option can make the output a
lot easier to understand by showing each directory as make
starts processing it and as make finishes processing it. For
example, if ‘make -w’ is run in the directory /u/gnu/make,
make will print a line of the form:
make: Entering directory `/u/gnu/make'.
before doing anything else, and a line of the form:
make: Leaving directory `/u/gnu/make'.
when processing is completed.
Normally, you do not need to specify this option because ‘make’
does it for you: ‘-w’ is turned on automatically when you use the
‘-C’ option, and in sub-makes. make will not
automatically turn on ‘-w’ if you also use ‘-s’, which says to
be silent, or if you use ‘--no-print-directory’ to explicitly
disable it.