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

My favorite answer to this was posted by Chris Down at Unix & Linux Stack Exchange. I'll quote.

This is how the bash completion module for make gets its list:

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

It prints out a newline-delimited list of targets, without paging.

User Brainstone suggests piping to sort -u to remove duplicate entries:

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

Source: How to list all targets in make? (Unix&Linux SE)