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Comment by blipvert | Hacker News Reader

If scripts need particular arguments the make is a good place to record them.

I use it quite a lot for automating deployments - if you want to Terraform up a VM:

  make colo1-fooserver01.vm

Then if you want to run Ansible against it:

  make colo1-fooserver01

You don’t have remember or type all of the flags or arguments - just type make and hit tab for a list of the targets that you can build

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Most shells will tab complete after `./scripts/` too. In fact that's probably more common than make completion.

I think the real reason is you have it all in one file rather than multiple scripts which makes it easier to edit and maintain.

Quite - one makefile rather than dozens of scripts which all do practically the same things.

But this can literally just be done in a simple shell script as well. The makefile ends up just being a redundant way to run a shell script.

> But this can literally just be done in a simple shell script as well.

Only if there's no dependencies. It's unusual that GP's type of usage has no dependencies.

I build .tf files from parameters for each host in the Makefile (and script which knows the vSphere topology) for one-shot execution (it only creates the VM, it doesn’t manage the lifecycle) and also template config that needs to be done before deployment - there are plenty of dependencies

When my shell scripts depend on another script ... they run the other script. Make definitely has its place, especially when dependencies get complex and parallel, but it's hardly necessary for simple cases. Once Make is needed, it's trivial to drop in and have it wrap the standalone scripts.

> When my shell scripts depend on another script ... they run the other script.

I hear you, but you're running the other script unconditionally. If it downloads something, it will download it every time you run the first script.

In this simple case, make runs the other script conditionally, so it need not run every time.

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