i was going to suggest something along the lines of control files target control files dir autotest dir hide  mkdir  p dir hide  cp control files package control files hide  mkdir  p dir hide  tar  cf c dir autotest  that way you would not end up blowing away all your copied files when any of them changes on the other hand  that will never clean up extra control files that exist in intermediates  but have been removed from autotest really  we need to package this in autotest and spit out generated dependency files the same could be said for all these other artifacts that we are creating i suppose this is fine for now 