I rarely use make, not a C hacker.

The specific meaning of make dist is described in Discipulus's Day 7: "To create a properly structured CPAN distribution you must run perl Makefile.PL then make dist , this will create a tarball in the current directory that you can share and install using a CPAN client, or even upload to CPAN."

But, in general, not every argument to make needs to be an explicit filename: it can also be a named target.

In much the same way that the targets for make test and make install perform specific actions in the normal perl Makefile.PL; make ; make test ; make install incantation, rather than creating files called test and install , the make dist doesn't create a file named dist but rather performs the actions necessary to create the distribution's tarball with the appropriate naming convention for uploading to CPAN.

• CF: EU::MM docs on the named targets useful for distro-development (and I assume that other build environments have similar documentation for their make targets, if different from EU::MM's targets)