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> awesome task-runner

I do this too. I have been trying to find examples of people doing something similar on the web but had no luck. I've replaced so many 5-line shell scripts in my user /bin by just having a single makefile in the root of my home directory and having aliases to the various commands defined in the makefile. I even have a rule that shows a rofi menu that allows me to run the rules easily although it's a bit hackish at the moment. Maybe the way to go would be pulling out the parts of Make that are good for a task runner into a separate application and add some nice extensions like .ONESHELL being implicit.

1 comments

Thirded - in a slightly different context. (See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5275313#5276744)

I’m currently managing data reduction for a bunch of space mission simulations using make. A simulation dumps a bunch of files as python pickles, which are reduced into csv, and then made into plots, and then into webpages. Each phase of this is in the makefile. None of the transformation rules are standard compilation macros like you expect to find in a makefile.

The setup makes it easy to update all the summary webpages when more sims are run. Just “make html”. It re-accumulates all the summary metrics, redoes graphics, remakes webpages.

This is the kind of processing pipeline that is often done in shell or with driver scripts, but then you always have to remake everything. I like the setup a lot.

I do the exact same thing with oddball compilation tasks like this, such as compiling a Latex document or batch-processing pictures.

I also use it to run code-formatters / static analysis tools while programming, sometimes with an secondary Makefile that has a name like 'maintainer.mk'.