How to get the invoking target of makefile?

47
votes

How to get the invoking target of the GNU make Makefile?

for example, I invoke make with the following command line:

make a-target

How can I get the invoking target "a-target" in the Makefile and assign it to a variable?

Further more, if more than one target is specified on the command line:

make target1 target2 ...

How do I get all of them?

2
makefilegnugnu-make

2 Answers

80
votes

The variable MAKECMDGOALS contains the list of targets that were specified on the command line, no matter how many (it's empty if there were none).