Great article! I could have only wished for such fine introductory material when I was starting off with Make. It would be nice if the docs themselves had a sim

Great article! I could have only wished for such fine introductory material when I was starting off with Make. It would be nice if the docs themselves had a similar chapter. One thing that I've always wanted from Make was a way of writing long commands with less escaping and without continuation characters. Something like heredoc for Make. For example, the following is just too arcane and I would by all means move the body of the command into a separate file: compress: find -iname '*.html' -print0 | \ while IFS="" read -r -d "" fn; do \ old=$$(stat -c "%s" "$$fn"); \ java -jar htmlcompressor.jar "$$fn" -o "$$fn"; \ new=$$(stat -c "%s" "$$fn"); \ delta=$$(echo "scale=2 ; 100 - ($$new/$$old) * 100" | bc); \ echo "compressed $${fn}: $${old}/$${new} $${delta}%"; \ done; Assuming there is no interpolation between Make and Bash, why not provide a way of writing the command as naturally as possible: compress: %cmd -flags -that -control -escaping << EOF find -iname '*.html' -print0 | while IFS="" read -r -d "" fn; do old=$(stat -c "%s" "${fn}") java -jar htmlcompressor.jar "${fn}" -o "${fn}" new=$(stat -c "%s" "${fn}") delta=$(echo "scale=2 ; 100 - (${new}/${old}) * 100" | bc) echo "compressed ${fn}: ${old}/${new} ${delta}%" done EOF Of course, shell and Make have a lot of conflicting syntax that would make this into a hard problem.