bash completion of makefile target

Question

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.

Cibin Joseph · Answer 1 · 2019-09-26T09:22:14.833

82

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:

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.
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.

edited Sep 26 '19 at 09:22

answered Jul 16 '16 at 21:51

Cibin Joseph

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I personally use: `complete -W "\`make -qp | sed -n -E 's/^([^.#\s][^:=]*)(:$|:\s+.*$)/\1/p' | sort -u'\`" make` – Jules Baratoux Mar 07 '17 at 20:51
4

I think it would be good to handle the case of no Makefile in cwd: complete -W "\`([[ -r Makefile ]] && grep -oE '^[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+:([^=]|$)' Makefile || cat /dev/null) | sed 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9_-]*$//'\`" make – sevenever Mar 15 '17 at 05:17
2

your solution is not detecting command that contain a point "." – famas23 Mar 25 '18 at 19:45
@ahmedbhs Updated to include recognition of "." – Cibin Joseph Mar 27 '18 at 09:45
2

they should not consider .PHONY and .env etcc so this is my suggestion complete -W "\`grep -oE '^[a-zA-Z0-9_-][a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+:([^=]|$)' Makefile | sed 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9_-]*$//'\`" make – famas23 Mar 27 '18 at 11:56

Kos · Accepted Answer · 2022-08-24T20:00:36.930

14

This answer from 2010 is outdated - the project mentioned here seems to have been discontinued.

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.

edited Aug 24 '22 at 20:00

answered Nov 15 '10 at 20:09

Kos

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link is broken. – Jonas Stein Aug 23 '22 at 23:02
@JonasStein thanks, I'm going to delete this one since I didn't find an alternative link for this projects. There's a lot of newer answers than mine – Kos Aug 24 '22 at 19:58
Oops I cannot delete because it's accepted. I'll leave a note. – Kos Aug 24 '22 at 19:59
try this. https://github.com/scop/bash-completion – Ярослав Рахматуллин Mar 07 '23 at 21:12

score 12 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 08 '19 at 15:27

12

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.)

answered Jan 08 '19 at 15:27

Paul Bissex

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for macOS - there is bash-completion@2 which directly conflicts with bash-completion. Encouraged to use @2 version if your bash >= 4.1. It doesnt seem to have Makefile completion included so adding custom rule in bashrc as raised in other answers might help. – mirageglobe Mar 28 '19 at 11:01

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 15 '10 at 20:18

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

score 3 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 04 '20 at 04:17

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

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Apr 22 '22 at 09:38

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

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Feb 23 '23 at 13:41

I added so I follow "include" directives in Makefile. So my .bashrc looks like this:

function followMakefile() {
  grep -oE '^[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+:([^=]|$)' ?akefile | sed 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9_.-]*$//'
  for x in `grep -E '^include' ?akefile | sed 's/include //'`
  do
    grep -oE '^[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+:([^=]|$)' $x | sed 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9_.-]*$//'
  done
}
complete -W "\`followMakefile\`" make

score -3 · Answer 8 · edited Aug 06 '14 at 19:38

-3

In Ubuntu 10.04, source the following file:

. /etc/bash_completion

or uncomment it in

/etc/bash.bashrc

edited Aug 06 '14 at 19:38

Qix - MONICA WAS MISTREATED

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answered Aug 06 '14 at 18:17

philtux

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