There's a -MT flag which does what the sed line does. From the gcc man page: Change the target of the rule emitted by dependency generation... An -MT optio

There's a -MT flag which does what the sed line does. From the gcc man page: Change the target of the rule emitted by dependency generation... An -MT option will set the target to be exactly the string you specify... So in your example one might do something like -MT "$@ $(basename $@).d" which would output main.o main.d : main.c defs.h for the main.o target.