bash completion of makefile target

Suppose I have a simple makefile like:

hello:
   echo "hello world"

bye:
   echo "bye bye"

Then in bash I want something like:

> make h < tab >

so it can complete to

> make hello

I found a simple way like creating empty files hello and bye but I'm looking for something more sophisticated.

Add this in your ~/.bash_profile file or ~/.bashrc file

complete -W "\`grep -oE '^[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+:([^=]|$)' ?akefile | sed 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9_.-]*$//'\`" make

This searches for a target in your Makefile titled 'Makefile' or 'makefile' (note the capital ? wildcard in ?akefile) using grep, and pipes it over to the complete command in bash which is used to specify how arguments are autocompleted. The -W flag denotes that the input to the complete command will be a wordlist which is accomplished by passing the results of grep through sed which arranges it into the desirable wordlist format.

Caveats and gotchas:

1. Your make file is named 'GNUMakefile' or anything else other than 'Makefile' or 'makefile'. If you frequently encounter such titles consider changing the regular expression ?akefile accordingly.

2. Forgetting to source your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc file after making the changes. I add this seemingly trivial detail since, to the uninitiated it is unfamiliar. For any change to your bash files to take effect, source them using the command

    source ~/.bashrc
   

or

    source ~/.bash_profile

PS. You also now have the added ability to display the possible make targets by pressing [Tab] twice just like in bash completion. Just make sure you add a space after the command make before typing [Tab] twice.

Could this be what you're looking for?

http://freshmeat.net/projects/bashcompletion/

> make [Tab] would complete on all > targets in Makefile. This project was > conceived to produce programmable > completion routines for the most > common Linux/UNIX commands, reducing > the amount of typing sysadmins and > programmers need to do on a daily > basis.

There's a useful package called bash-completion available for most every OS. It includes Makefile completion.

(If you're using macOS and Homebrew, you can get this via brew install bash-completion.)

This seems to be default in at least Debian Lenny:

$ grep Makefile /etc/bash_completion
	# make reads `GNUmakefile', then `makefile', then `Makefile'
	elif [ -f ${makef_dir}/Makefile ]; then
		makef=${makef_dir}/Makefile
	# before we scan for targets, see if a Makefile name was
	# deal with included Makefiles

The header of this file states:

#   The latest version of this software can be obtained here:
#
#   http://bash-completion.alioth.debian.org/
#
#   RELEASE: 20080617.5

Here is a completion script that looks at the .PHONY: declaration.

_make_phony_words() {
  local opt_revert

  if [ -n "${BASH_VERSION:-}" ]; then
    shopt -q nullglob || {
      opt_revert=1 ; shopt -s nullglob ;
    }

  elif [ -n "${ZSH_VERSION:-}" ]; then
    [[ -o nullglob ]] || {
      opt_revert=1 ; setopt nullglob
    }
  fi

  for f in ./?akefile ./*.make ; do
    sed -nEe '/^.PHONY/ { s/^.PHONY:[ ]?// ; p ; } ' "$f" | tr ' ' $'\n' | sort -u
  done

  if [ -n "$opt_revert" ]; then

    [ -n "${ZSH_VERSION:-}" ] && unsetopt nullglob
    [ -n "${BASH_VERSION:-}" ] && shopt -u nullglob
  fi
  unset opt_revert

}

_make_phony_complete() {
  local cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"

  COMPREPLY+=( $(compgen -W "$( _make_phony_words )" -- ${cur}) )

}
complete -F _make_phony_complete make

Makefile completion on steroids!

I had 2 problems with the normal completions:

Problem #1

Sometimes you have targets you want to call like make greet:hi and make greet:hola sort of like namespacing Makefile target names. So your Makefile ends up looking like:

greet\:hola:
   echo "hola world"

# OR a .PHONY target
.PHONY: greet\:hi
greet\:hi:
   echo "hi world"

In this case the auto-completions after : don't show up as it uses \: in the Makefile as shown above.

Problem #2

There wasn't a way to navigate through the list of all Makefile targets that match my input using arrow keys (or CTRL-p / CTRL-n) in my bash shell.

Basically, I wanted to use fuzzy search like approach on the targets (i.e. fzf). FZF Repo: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Solution

Install FZF Dependency

Using Homebrew

You can use Homebrew (on macOS or Linux) to install fzf.

brew install fzf
$(brew --prefix)/opt/fzf/install

Using Linux package managers

Package Manager	Linux Distribution	Command
APK	Alpine Linux	sudo apk add fzf
APT	Debian 9+/Ubuntu 19.10+	sudo apt-get install fzf
Conda		conda install -c conda-forge fzf
DNF	Fedora	sudo dnf install fzf
Nix	NixOS, etc.	nix-env -iA nixpkgs.fzf
Pacman	Arch Linux	sudo pacman -S fzf
pkg	FreeBSD	pkg install fzf
pkgin	NetBSD	pkgin install fzf
pkg_add	OpenBSD	pkg_add fzf
XBPS	Void Linux	sudo xbps-install -S fzf
Zypper	openSUSE	sudo zypper install fzf

FZF and : compatible auto-complete command

Put this in your .bashrc

complete -W "\`grep -oE '^[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+[\\:]*[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+:([^=]|$)' ?akefile | sort | uniq | sed 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9_.-]*$//' | sed 's/[\]//g' | fzf\`" make

Now just typing make and then hitting the key will work!

DEMO: in action!

Then you can use as following:

make using fzf

In Ubuntu 10.04, source the following file:

. /etc/bash_completion

or uncomment it in

/etc/bash.bashrc