The linux kernel (and various other projects including git) have very nice makefiles that hide the giant cc calls into nice little acronyms.

For example:

gcc -O2 -o cool.o cool.c -llib
gcc -O2 -o neat.o neat.c -llib

would become:

CC cool.c
CC neat.c

Which is really nice if you have a project with a large number of files and long compiler flags. I recall that this had to do with suppressing the default output and making a custom one. How do you do it?