Can CMake generate build scripts which do *not* use cmake?

CMake generated files depend on cmake for various commands such as create / remove / etc... not just to regenerate the makefiles on a change so removing cmake is not going to work.

No, CMake cannot do this. It doesn't really make sense, either, since without any CMake-support at build-time, there would be no way to check or update the makefiles/project-files themselves when the CMakeLists.txt files have changed.

If you are moving from Visual Studio to CMake, you may want to take a look at vcproj2cmake.

The ability to do this depends on your OS, I'm presuming Unix/Makefile or Windows/MSVC. If you're using MSVC, the cmake dependency should be eliminated by declaring the CMAKE_SUPPRESS_REGENERATION option at the start of your cmake script.

SET(CMAKE_SUPPRESS_REGENERATION TRUE)

On Unix-based systems, however, the Makefiles are tied explicitly to the cmake build files (CMakeFiles, etc). I suspect that this dependency could be bypassed by the strategic commenting out of Makefile directives although, I cannot say what they might be.