When you call make with arguments, you give it a list of goals.
This is stated in the Port Upgrade section of the FreeBSD Handbook , which states:
Unlike the usual make install clean command, it will upgrade all the dependencies prior to building and installing the selected port. [...] Note: You can save two extra steps by just running make install clean instead of make, make install and make clean as three separate steps.
Also, as a note: do not build your package as root if you really need it. In general, you should work in an unprivileged account, and then as a last step, you can do sudo make install if you need to. It would be better, however, to add an unprivileged user to the group with write access to the installation directories, or even better to install it in a non-system area (for example, using ./configure you can use --prefix= ), since most systems, whether Linux or BSD, usually have packages and a packaging system that is used to install software.