Yeah you can set the library path with -L but if the path is a non-standard path it wont work when the program is linked.

So far i've been using gcc to compile and ld to link in my Makefile, i guess i could try doing it both with gcc and see if there is a difference.

Basically the problem is that i want make to automatically compile and link a program and a library in a non-standard path, so no root privileges are allowed.

I can do it just fine but only if i setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH in tcsh, in other words use MY shells program. So it's not portable to other shells. That's why i wanted to find out if there was a way for GNU Make to pass LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the linker for when the program is linked to the recently compiled library.