I was guilty of this habit of misusing Makefiles for a few years. I see why it's appealing but you're totally right for all of the given reasons. Nowadays I us

I was guilty of this habit of misusing Makefiles for a few years. I see why it's appealing but you're totally right for all of the given reasons. Nowadays I use (and highly recommend) using standard-library Python for this sort of thing. It's much more readable than shell scripts and it's completely cross-platform so you can use the same script for Windows, Mac, Linux.