How to pass argument to Makefile from command line

Question

How to pass argument to Makefile from command line   I understand I can do    make action VAR  value    value   with Makefile  VAR    default  action       echo   VAR    How do I get the following behavior     make action value value      How about   make action value1 value2 value1 value2

User · Accepted Answer

You probably shouldn t do this  you re breaking the basic pattern of how Make works  But here it is   action           echo action   filter-out      MAKECMDGOALS              thanks to chakrit             thanks to William Pursell   EDIT  To explain the first command     MAKECMDGOALS  is the list of  targets  spelled out on the command line  e g   action value1 value2       is an automatic variable for the name of the target of the rule  in this case  action    filter-out is a function that removes some elements from a list  So   filter-out bar  foo bar baz  returns foo baz  it can be more subtle  but we don t need subtlety here    Put these together and   filter-out      MAKECMDGOALS   returns the list of targets specified on the command line other than  action   which might be  value1 value2

User · Answer

don t try to do this    make action value1 value2   instead create script       bin sh   rebuild if necessary make   do action with arguments action        and do this       buildthenaction sh value1 value2   for more explanation why do this and caveats of makefile hackery read my answer to another very similar but seemingly not duplicate question  Passing arguments to  quot make run quot

User · Answer

Much easier aproach  Consider a task   provision          ansible-playbook -vvvv           -i  vagrant provisioners ansible inventory vagrant ansible inventory           --private-key  vagrant machines default virtualbox private key           --start-at-task    AT             -u vagrant playbook yml   Now when I want to call it I just run something like   AT  build assets  make provision  or just   make provision in this case AT is an empty string

User · Answer

Here is a generic working solution based on  Beta s  I m using GNU Make 4 1 with SHELL  bin bash atop my Makefile  so YMMV   This allows us to accept extra arguments  by doing nothing when we get a job that doesn t match  rather than throwing an error                And this is a macro which gets the args for us   args    arg    filter-out      MAKECMDGOALS     amp  amp  echo    arg -  1      Here is a job which might call this one   test       echo   call args defaultstring    The result would be     make test defaultstring   make test hi hi   Note  You might be better off using a  Taskfile   which is a bash pattern that works similarly to make  only without the nuances of Maketools  See https   github com adriancooney Taskfile

User · Answer

Few years later  want to suggest just for this  https   github com casey just action v1 v2 default       echo  take action on   v1   and   v2

[command-line] How to pass argument to Makefile from command line?

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