What problems would there be doing things from GNU make, that there wouldn't be when doing the same thing from a shell script? My experience has been that you

What problems would there be doing things from GNU make, that there wouldn't be when doing the same thing from a shell script? My experience has been that you can totally use GNU make as a replacement for shell scripts, and it works fine. Why wouldn't it? It's just sequences of shell commands, where each sequence has a name. And in fact for this sort of situation, where you've got one of a pre-canned set of sequences to run, it works very well - because GNU make will handle the command line for you, and most shells will give you some kind of basic (but usable) tab completion for the sequences available, without any effort on your part. You do need to use phony targets, though. (https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Phony-Targets.html https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Phony-Tar...) This might seem like a ridiculous requirement, but I've seen plenty of bash scripts that just kept on going when a shell command failed; it's not like GNU make is unique in requiring a small amount of boilerplate to make things work nicely.