Gnu make

Two blog posts by John Graham-Cumming, author of the GNU Make Book.

• The one line you should add to every makefile

• One weird trick that will give you makefile X-ray vision

  This article advocates adding the lines:

  _SHELL := $(SHELL)
  SHELL = $(warning [$@])$(_SHELL) -x
  

A commenter also added a link to stack overflow with a few other options (here).

• Debugging Makefiles by John Graham-Cumming. Feb 2007. An even older article in Dr Dobbs, now linked through the web-archive. [1]

• The GNU Make Debugger http://gmd.sourceforge.net/

Footnotes

[1]

Accessed on 28 Aug 2019

This is a note of a command I used to find the targets from a make:

make -qp | awk -F':' '/^[a-zA-Z0-9][^$#\/\t=]*:([^=]|$)/ {split($1,A,/ /);for(i in A)print A[i]}' | sort -u

(copied from Marc 2377’s answer in stack overflow on 26 March 2023)