Making make print commands before executing when NOT using CMake

For my version of make, I found BOTH paramters -n and -d helped.

GNU Make 3.80 Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc

  -d                          Print lots of debugging information.
  -n, --just-print, --dry-run, --recon
                              Don't actually run any commands; just print them.

When a bunch of makefile fragments are included, the line numbers don't make sense without this key debug flag.

CreateProcess(....exe,...)
Reading makefile `../../../../build/Makefile.options' (search path) (don't care) (no ~ expansion)...
Makefile:361: Extraneous text after `else' directive
Makefile:368: Extraneous text after `else' directive
Makefile:368: *** only one `else' per conditional.  Stop.

I think this is what you want: make MAKE_VERBOSE=1 target

By default, make does print every command before executing it. This printing can be suppressed by one of the following mechanisms:

• on a case-by-case basis, by adding @ at the beginning of the command
• globally, by adding the .SILENT built-in target.
• somewhere along the make process, by invoking sub-make(s) with one of the flags -s, --silent or --quiet, as in $(MAKE) --silent -C someDir, for example. From that moment on, command echoing is suppressed in the sub-make.

If your makefile does not print the commands, then it is probably using one of these three mechanisms, and you have to actually inspect the makefile(s) to figure out which.

As a workaround to avoid these echo-suppressing mechanisms, you could re-define the shell to be used to use a debug mode, for example like make SHELL="/bin/bash -x" target. Other shells have similar options. With that approach, it is not make printing the commands, but the shell itself.

If you use the flag -n or --just-print, the echo-suppressing mechanisms will be ignored and you will always see all commands that make thinks should be executed -- but they are not actually executed, just printed. That might be a good way to figure out what you can actually expect to see.

The VERBOSE variable has no standard meaning for make, but only if your makefile interprets it.