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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I've got a similar setup but just

    .PHONY: help
    help: ## Display this help
        @grep -E '^[ a-zA-Z_-]+:.*?## .*$$' $(MAKEFILE_LIST) | sort | awk 'BEGIN {FS = ":.*?## "}; {printf "%-30s %s\n", $$1, $$2}'

This was from HN a couple years ago

View on HN

Yeah I ended up with my own variant from here as well many moons ago:

  .PHONY: help
  help: # Show this help screen
      @ack '^[a-zA-Z_-]+:.*?# .*$$' $(MAKEFILE_LIST) |\
      sort -k1,1 |\
      awk 'BEGIN {FS = ":.*?# "}; {printf "\033[1m%-30s\033[0m %s\n", $$1, $$2}'

Ah yes, summon Cthulhu to explain the makefile to you. Seems extreme to me but some people have SAN to spare.

I’ve been doing that as well. Here [1] a more elaborate example, might be the original article.

[1] https://www.thapaliya.com/en/writings/well-documented-makefi...

I've been on HN for years, but missed this. Thank you!

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