Sometimes it might be desirable to define a rule that is only executed when all other rules have failed to make a target up-to-date. As a last resort, one might wish to simply touch the target file, or perform no action at all, and allow Make to continue.
.DEFAULT:
command lines
If the .DEFAULT target is given no commands (as is the default behaviour) then the Make program will terminate with an error whenever it encounters a target name that cannot be made.