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

For a Bash Script

Here's a very simple way to do this in bash -- based on the comment by @cibercitizen1 above:

grep : Makefile | awk -F: '/^[^.]/ {print $1;}'

See also the more authoritative answer by @Marc.2377, too, which says how the Bash completion module for make does it.