As someone who also writes a lot of shell scripts and has for decades, I’d guess that if you learn just a little make, you’ll find lots of non-coding uses for i

As someone who also writes a lot of shell scripts and has for decades, I’d guess that if you learn just a little make, you’ll find lots of non-coding uses for it and wish you’d learned it earlier. ;) It’s just another great unix tool that is sometimes very handy to augment shell scripts when you need it, not unlike find+grep+sort, cut+join, awk+sed, gnu parallel, etc.. I think make is under-appreciated for its uses outside of code compilation. I use it anytime I’m making gnuplots, or doing image processing on the command line, for example. Whenever you have a batch of files to process, and the batch might need to re-run, and it transforms into other files or a single big file, then make may be the right tool Make has at its core one thing that would be pretty tedious to do in shell scripts: update the target (output) file only if it’s older than the prerequisite (dependency/input) file(s). This applies transitively to files that depend on other files that might change during the run of make, which is the part that really separates make from a shell script. The thing you do when the target needs updating is run a little snippet of shell script, so that part you already know. After learning how a rule works, you can combine it with ‘pattern rules’ to abstract a rule over all files that share a common prefix or common extension. Suddenly you have a loop but without any loop syntax, and can process a thousand files on demand with 2 lines of make - and without modification you can change a single input file, have it process only a single output file, and not waste your time re-running the 999 other files. Also pro-tip: make will run in parallel if you use -j, and it will do it without breaking any dependency chains. If you have a process that turns text files into sql files and then turns this sql files into html files (possibly nonsensical example), make running in parallel will not blindly update html files first, it will run parallel jobs in the correct dependency order. You can use make to build something like gnu parallel, but is able to resume a batch job that was interrupted in the middle!