make clean is slow

[Bob Friesenhahn]

I find that 'make clean' is annoyingly slow.  For my package 'make 
clean' takes more than 1/10 of the optimized build time even though I 
am using a very fast disk subsystem.  For the clean target, Automake 
produces many chunks which are of the form:

clean-codersLTLIBRARIES:
        -test -z "$(coders_LTLIBRARIES)" || rm -f $(coders_LTLIBRARIES)
        @list='$(coders_LTLIBRARIES)'; for p in $$list; do \
          dir="`echo $$p | sed -e 's|/[^/]*$$||'`"; \
          test "$$dir" != "$$p" || dir=.; \
          echo "rm -f \"$${dir}/so_locations\""; \
          rm -f "$${dir}/so_locations"; \
        done

or

clean-binPROGRAMS:
        @list='$(bin_PROGRAMS)'; test -n "$$list" || exit 0; \
        echo " rm -f" $$list; \
        rm -f $$list || exit $$?; \
        test -n "$(EXEEXT)" || exit 0; \
        list=`for p in $$list; do echo "$$p"; done | sed 's/$(EXEEXT)$$//'`; \
        echo " rm -f" $$list; \
        rm -f $$list

Is there a way to make this quite a lot faster?

Thanks,

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/