[dima55]

The tool you want is remake: http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/remake/

This is GNU Make + a few patches. So it's 100% compatible. And you get an interactive debugger, and lots more stuff. For instance, to list out the commands:

  remake --targets

No idea why this hasn't been merged upstream.

Your larger point really stands, though: if you're just running commands, you shouldn't be using Make. But it is abused in that way often, so...

[matthewbauer]

How does it deal with wildcard rules? I would bet it gets complicated when you start having chained wildcard rules that have also side effects.

[dima55]

There's --targets and --tasks to handle such things, but it really depends on the Makefile in question. If you really want to know how it behaves, apt install remake.

[jackewiehose]

> remake --targets; No idea why this hasn't been merged upstream

I would think because it's useless. The targets in a Makefile are very often just internal and aren't always meant to be run by the user.

[rixed]

Many shell autocompleters would read the makefile to complete target names though, suggesting it is not useless.

Anyway, one could always have a 'help' target that prints a short documentation. This also avoid listing internal targets.

[jackewiehose]

Yes, I remember using zsh and in my experience this was barely useful since most Makefiles are auto-generated with hundreds or thousands of targets.

> one could always have a 'help' target that prints a short documentation

Sure, that's fine. But the point is that if you have an unknown Makefile you can't (or shouldn't) just execute it without knowing what it will do. Makefiles should be treated as individual programs just like any other executable and there's no guaranteed standard way to get help from it.

[dima55]

It has an interactive debugger, which is not useless. Clearly.

[jackewiehose]

I was just referring to the --targets option which I thought was meant as an answer to the missing standard help.