2.2 Listing and Documenting Makefile Targets

Have you ever wanted rake tasks for GNU Make? That is, you have some strange Makefile and you want to see the interesting targets, that you can run “make target-name” on?

There are two new options added to ‘remake‘ to assist this:

• --tasks gives a list of “interesting” targets
• --targets gives a list of all targets

Before each target in the Makefile, you can give add a one-line comment describing what the target does, starting the comment with #:.

If you do this, when either of these options is shown it will also be shown with next to the target name.

Here is an example. Consider this Makefile:

#: This is the main target
all:
	echo all here

#: test things
check:
	echo check here

#: Build distribution
dist:
	echo dist here

Running remake --tasks gives:

all         # This is the main target
check       # test things
dist        # Build distribution