Johannes Buchner

With the following grep/sed combinations, you can keep the help for each target inline just above your target (or wherever you want it).

## Makefile for foo

## help: this clutter

help:

        @grep -E '^## ' Makefile|grep -v ':'|sed 's,^## ,,g'

        @echo This Makefile has the targets:

        @grep -E '^## [.a-z]{2,}:' Makefile|sed 's,^## *,\t,g' |sed 's,: ,\t,g'

## tests: run the tests

tests: tests.exe

        ./tests.exe ${TESTNR}

Output of

$ make help

Makefile for foo

This Makefile has the targets:

	help	this clutter

	all	

	tests	run the tests

...

Nice, leet and meta. :-)

Some more words on Makefiles: You can use something like

CFLAGS=-O3 -Wall -Werror -Wextra -g -ansi -pedantic ${CCFLAGS}

and pass CCFLAGS from outside. This avoids having many many versions while trying to test things out. For example:

$ CCFLAGS="-DDEBUG -Os -DUSED_ALGORITHM=binsearch2" make tests

(if you didn’t notice yet, -DFOO lets you jump inside #ifdef FOO).