How do you get the list of targets in a makefile?

Question

I\'ve used rake a bit (a Ruby make program), and it has an option to get a list of all the available targets, eg

> rake --tasks
rake db:charset      # ret         


        

Answer 1

If you have bash completion for make installed, the completion script will define a function _make_target_extract_script. This function is meant to create a sed script which can be used to obtain the targets as a list.

Use it like this:

# Make sure bash completion is enabled
source /etc/bash_completion 

# List targets from Makefile
sed -nrf <(_make_target_extract_script --) Makefile