How to pass argument to Makefile from command line?

Question

How to pass argument to Makefile from command line?

I understand I can do

$ make action VAR=\"value\"
$ value

with Makefile

Answer 1

Here is a generic working solution based on @Beta's

I'm using GNU Make 4.1 with SHELL=/bin/bash atop my Makefile, so YMMV!

This allows us to accept extra arguments (by doing nothing when we get a job that doesn't match, rather than throwing an error).

%:
    @:

And this is a macro which gets the args for us:

args = `arg="$(filter-out $@,$(MAKECMDGOALS))" && echo $${arg:-${1}}`

Here is a job which might call this one:

test:
    @echo $(call args,defaultstring)

The result would be:

$ make test
defaultstring
$ make test hi
hi

Note! You might be better off using a "Taskfile", which is a bash pattern that works similarly to make, only without the nuances of Maketools. See https://github.com/adriancooney/Taskfile