Q:

How download make and set "make" as a command?

I went onto the GNU website to download make. I went to the main GNU FTP server to choose one to download. I chose make-4.1.tar.gz and extracted the files.
I was not sure what to do from there so I went to the folder that was created from extracted the files and ran ./configure hoping it would do something I wanted. I'm still not sure what it did.
When I run make from the command line it says make: command not found. Did I download make correctly and what do I have to do to get it to see make as a command?
I'm on Windows.

A:

For Linux, the README file that has these instructions:

If you need to build GNU Make and have no other 'make' program to use,
  you can use the shell script 'build.sh' instead.  To do this, first
  run 'configure' as described in INSTALL.  Then, instead of typing
  'make' to build the program, type 'sh build.sh'.  This should compile
  the program in the current directory.  Then you will have a Make
  program that you can use for './make install', or whatever else.

If you're on Windows, refer to README.W32 instead. It contains instructions to build make using MinGW and MSVC. However, you generally don't want to compile from source, and instead use a port that has already done that for you.
For example, if you intend to use MinGW, MSYS contains make. If you're using Cygwin, the installer allows you select it as a package. If you want a 64-bit MinGW distro that already comes with make and several other packages, such as the GNU coreutils, see nuwen.net. 
The distro I mentioned above allows you to write commands like gcc and make without the annoying mingw32 prefix.

