[0xbadcafebee]

I use Bash scripts as a customizable user interface to other tools. Sometimes that's better than Make (like when I want a customizable deployment frontend for both my laptop and ci/cd, I write a deploy.sh script). But sometimes Make is much better for what I want to do.

Make's weirdness exists for a useful purpose. Using Bash to avoid learning Make's useful features not only abandons useful functionality, but then runs into the weirdness of Bash (which also exists for a useful purpose).

Kids today are so impatient they never take the time to skill themselves up, and end up wasting more time in the long run. The most efficient use of anybody's time is to learn valuable skills once that save them time and frustration later. Read the manuals for tools like Make, learn how to use them, and you will reap the rewards for your entire career. Avoid learning Make and you will have a long career being frustrated by how everything is hard, complicated and time-consuming.

[safety1st]

Yeah, just spend the two hours to learn the basics of make because it's already on pretty much every computer out there. Now for the rest of your life all your projects will have a baseline task runner, deployment strategy, infrastructure as code solution, and all around place to store random commands you need to remember, which will be in the repo from the first commit. Of course many projects will require something fancier which is fine. But make provides an 'engine' for all those things which is roughly as ubiquitous as your actual language runtime. You never have to suffer a project without them again.