Under Bash (at least), this can be done automatically with tab completion:

make spacetabtab

If you're using a bare-bones distribution (maybe a container) you might need to install a package.

$ apt-get install bash-completion ## Debian/Ubuntu/etc.
$ . /etc/bash_completion ## or just launch bash again

Update!

As of Jan 8th, 2024, Make has a --print-targets option that should do this properly without hacky regexes. The current version is Make 4.4.1 so the next release after that will have this feature.

If your Makefile was created by CMake you might be able to run make help.

$ make help
The following are some of the valid targets for this Makefile:
... all (the default if no target is provided)
... clean
... depend
... install
etc

If not, I wrote a patch to add proper support for this obviously useful feature to Make. This is way better than all the other answers here which all involve horrible hacks to grep the Makefiles. That obviously doesn't work if you include other Makefiles, use computed target names, etc.

The patch hasn't been merged so you have to build from source. It's not too bad but you do need some crusty old autoconf-related build tools:

git clone https://github.com/Timmmm/make
cd make
./bootstrap
./configure
make -j4

On Linux you can use this binary I built already.

Then you can use the -l flag to list targets:

./make -C /path/to/your/project -l

I combined these two answers: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9524878/86967 and https://stackoverflow.com/a/7390874/86967 and did some escaping so that this could be used from inside a makefile.

.PHONY: no_targets__ list
no_targets__:
list:
    sh -c "$(MAKE) -p no_targets__ | awk -F':' '/^[a-zA-Z0-9][^\$$#\/\\t=]*:([^=]|$$)/ {split(\$$1,A,/ /);for(i in A)print A[i]}' | grep -v '__\$$' | sort"

.

$ make -s list
build
clean
default
distclean
doc
fresh
install
list
makefile ## this is kind of extraneous, but whatever...
run

My favorite answer to this was posted by Chris Down at Unix & Linux Stack Exchange. I'll quote.

This is how the bash completion module for make gets its list:

make -qp | awk -F':' '/^[a-zA-Z0-9][^$#\/\t=]*:([^=]|$)/ {split($1,A,/ /);for(i in A)print A[i]}'

It prints out a newline-delimited list of targets, without paging.

User Brainstone suggests piping to sort -u to remove duplicate entries:

make -qp | awk -F':' '/^[a-zA-Z0-9][^$#\/\t=]*:([^=]|$)/ {split($1,A,/ /);for(i in A)print A[i]}' | sort -u

Source: How to list all targets in make? (Unix&Linux SE)

As mklement0 points out, a feature for listing all Makefile targets is missing from GNU-make, and his answer and others provides ways to do this.

However, the original post also mentions rake, whose tasks switch does something slightly different than just listing all tasks in the rakefile. Rake will only give you a list of tasks that have associated descriptions. Tasks without descriptions will not be listed. This gives the author the ability to both provide customized help descriptions and also omit help for certain targets.

If you want to emulate rake's behavior, where you provide descriptions for each target, there is a simple technique for doing this: embed descriptions in comments for each target you want listed.

You can either put the description next to the target or, as I often do, next to a PHONY specification above the target, like this:

.PHONY: target1 # Target 1 help text
target1: deps
    [... target 1 build commands]

.PHONY: target2 # Target 2 help text
target2:
    [... target 2 build commands]

...                                                                                                         

.PHONY: help # Generate list of targets with descriptions                                                                
help:                                                                                                                    
    @grep '^.PHONY: .* #' Makefile | sed 's/\.PHONY: \(.*\) # \(.*\)/\1 \2/' | expand -t20

Which will yield

$ make help
target1             Target 1 help text
target2             Target 2 help text

...
help                Generate list of targets with descriptions

You can also find a short code example in this gist and here too.

Again, this does not solve the problem of listing all the targets in a Makefile. For example, if you have a big Makefile that was maybe generated or that someone else wrote, and you want a quick way to list its targets without digging through it, this won't help.

However, if you are writing a Makefile, and you want a way to generate help text in a consistent, self-documenting way, this technique may be useful.

If you have bash completion for make installed, the completion script will define a function _make_target_extract_script. This function is meant to create a sed script which can be used to obtain the targets as a list.

Use it like this:

# Make sure bash completion is enabled
source /etc/bash_completion 

# List targets from Makefile
sed -nrf <(_make_target_extract_script --) Makefile

I took a few answers mentioned above and compiled this one, which can also generate a nice description for each target and it works for targets with variables too.

Example Makefile:

APPS?=app1 app2

bin: $(APPS:%=%.bin)
    @# Help: A composite target that relies only on other targets

$(APPS:%=%.bin): %.bin:
    @# Help: A target with variable name, value = $*

test:
    @# Help: A normal target without variables

# A target without any help description
clean:

# A hidden target
.hidden:

help:
    @printf "%-20s %s\n" "Target" "Description"
    @printf "%-20s %s\n" "------" "-----------"
    @make -pqR : 2>/dev/null \
        | awk -v RS= -F: '/^# File/,/^# Finished Make data base/ {if ($$1 !~ "^[#.]") {print $$1}}' \
        | sort \
        | egrep -v -e '^[^[:alnum:]]' -e '^$@$$' \
        | xargs -I _ sh -c 'printf "%-20s " _; make _ -nB | (grep -i "^# Help:" || echo "") | tail -1 | sed "s/^# Help: //g"'

Example output:

$ make help
Target               Description
------               -----------
app1.bin             A target with variable name, value = app1
app2.bin             A target with variable name, value = app2
bin                  A composite target that relies only on other targets
clean
test                 A normal target without variables

How does it work:

The top part of the make help target works exactly as posted by mklement0 here - How do you get the list of targets in a makefile?.

After getting the list of targets, it runs make <target> -nB as a dry run for each target and parses the last line that starts with @# Help: for the description of the target. And that or an empty string is printed in a nicely formatted table.

As you can see, the variables are even expanded within the description as well, which is a huge bonus in my book :).

Focusing on an easy syntax for describing a make target, and having a clean output, I chose this approach:

help:
    @grep -B1 -E "^[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+\:([^\=]|$$)" Makefile \
     | grep -v -- -- \
     | sed 'N;s/\n/###/' \
     | sed -n 's/^#: \(.*\)###\(.*\):.*/\2###\1/p' \
     | column -t  -s '###'


#: Starts the container stack
up: a b
  command

#: Pulls in new container images
pull: c d 
    another command

make-target-not-shown:

# this does not count as a description, so leaving
# your implementation comments alone, e.g TODOs
also-not-shown:

So treating the above as a Makefile and running it gives you something like

> make help
up          Starts the container stack
pull        Pulls in new container images

Explanation for the chain of commands:

• First, grep all targets and their preceeding line, see https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/320709/223029.
• Then, get rid of the group separator, see https://stackoverflow.com/a/2168139/1242922.
• Then, we collapse each pair of lines to parse it later, see https://stackoverflow.com/a/9605559/1242922.
• Then, we parse for valid lines and remove those which do not match, see https://stackoverflow.com/a/8255627/1242922, and also give the output our desired order: command, then description.
• Lastly, we arrange the output like a table.

Add this target to your Makefile:

help:
    @echo "\nTARGETS:\n"
    @make -qpRr | egrep -e '^[a-z].*:$$' | sed -e 's~:~~g' | sort
    @echo ""

• make -qpRr = make --question --print-data-base --no-builtin-variables --no-builtin-rules
• egrep -e '^[a-z].*:$$': searches for lines which start with lowercase and ends with ":"
• sed -e 's~:~~g': deletes the ":"

Then just run:

make help

This works for me 😉

PD: more info at...

make --help

@nobar's answer helpfully shows how to use tab completion to list a makefile's targets.

• This works great for platforms that provide this functionality by default (e.g., Debian, Fedora).

• On other platforms (e.g., Ubuntu) you must explicitly load this functionality, as implied by @hek2mgl's answer:

  • . /etc/bash_completion installs several tab-completion functions, including the one for make
  • Alternatively, to install only tab completion for make:
    • . /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/make

• For platforms that don't offer this functionality at all, such as OSX, you can source the following commands (adapated from here) to implement it:

_complete_make() { COMPREPLY=($(compgen -W "$(make -pRrq : 2>/dev/null | awk -v RS= -F: '/^# File/,/^# Finished Make data base/ {if ($1 !~ "^[#.]") {print $1}}' | egrep -v '^[^[:alnum:]]' | sort | xargs)" -- "${COMP_WORDS[$COMP_CWORD]}")); }
complete -F _complete_make make

• Note: This is not as sophisticated as the tab-completion functionality that comes with Linux distributions: most notably, it invariably targets the makefile in the current directory, even if the command line targets a different makefile with -f <file>.

For a Bash Script

Here's a very simple way to do this in bash -- based on the comment by @cibercitizen1 above:

grep : Makefile | awk -F: '/^[^.]/ {print $1;}'

See also the more authoritative answer by @Marc.2377, too, which says how the Bash completion module for make does it.

This help target will only print targets which have ## followed by a description. This allows for documenting both public and private targets. Using the .DEFAULT_GOAL makes the help more discoverable.

Only sed, xargs and printf used which are pretty common.

Using the < $(MAKEFILE_LIST) allows for the makefile to be called something other than Makefile for instance Makefile.github

You can customize the output to suit your preference in the printf. This example is set up to match the OP's request for rake style output

When cutting and pasting the below make file, don't forget to change the 4 spaces indentation to tabs.

# vim:ft=make
# Makefile

.DEFAULT_GOAL := help
.PHONY: test help

help:  ## these help instructions
    @sed -rn 's/^([a-zA-Z_-]+):.*?## (.*)$$/"\1" "\2"/p' < $(MAKEFILE_LIST) | xargs printf "make %-20s# %s\n"

lint: ## style, bug and quality checker
    pylint src test

private: # for internal usage only
    @true

test: private ## run pytest with coverage
    pytest --cov test

Here is the output from the Makefile above. Notice the private target doesn't get output because it only has a single # for it's comment.

$ make
make help                # these help instructions
make lint                # style, bug and quality checker
make test                # run pytest with coverage

This is far from clean, but did the job, for me.

make -p 2&>/dev/null | grep -A 100000 "# Files" | grep -v "^$" | grep -v "^\(\s\|#\|\.\)" | grep -v "Makefile:" | cut -d ":" -f 1

I use make -p that dumps the internal database, ditch stderr, use a quick and dirty grep -A 100000 to keep the bottom of the output. Then I clean the output with a couple of grep -v, and finally use cut to get what's before the colon, namely, the targets.

This is enough for my helper scripts on most of my Makefiles.

EDIT: added grep -v Makefile that is an internal rule

To expand on the answer given by @jsp, you can even evaluate variables in your help text with the $(eval) function.

The proposed version below has these enhanced properties:

• Will scan any makefiles (even included)
• Will expand live variables referenced in the help comment
• Adds documentation anchor for real targets (prefixed with # TARGETDOC:)
• Adds column headers

So to document, use this form:

RANDOM_VARIABLE := this will be expanded in help text

.PHONY: target1 # Target 1 help with $(RANDOM_VARIABLE)
target1: deps
    [... target 1 build commands]

# TARGETDOC: $(BUILDDIR)/real-file.txt # real-file.txt help text
$(BUILDDIR)/real-file.txt:
    [... $(BUILDDIR)/real-file.txt build commands]

Then, somewhere in your makefile:

.PHONY: help # Generate list of targets with descriptions
help:
    @# find all help in targets and .PHONY and evaluate the embedded variables
    $(eval doc_expanded := $(shell grep -E -h '^(.PHONY:|# TARGETDOC:) .* #' $(MAKEFILE_LIST) | sed -E -n 's/(\.PHONY|# TARGETDOC): (.*) # (.*)/\2  \3\\n/'p | expand -t40))
    @echo
    @echo ' TARGET   HELP' | expand -t40
    @echo ' ------   ----' | expand -t40
    @echo -e ' $(doc_expanded)'

make doesn't support this by default and other answers have shown how to extract the list of possible targets automatically.

However, in case you want to have more control with the listing without any side-effects (such as using the .PHONY target to mark the documentation which prevents the logic of using the target names as actual files which Make uses to decide which targets needs to be rebuilt), you can invent your own syntax just for the documentation. I prefer to use ### like this:

CPUS ?= $(shell nproc)
MAKEFLAGS += -j $(CPUS) -l $(CPUS) -s

# Basic paths
PREFIX  ?= usr
BINDIR  ?= $(PREFIX)/bin
ETCDIR  ?= etc
MANDIR  ?= $(PREFIX)/share/man
# ...

### help: Show help message (default target)
# use "help" as the default target (first target in the Makefile)
.PHONY: help
help:
    @printf "%s\n\n" "make: List of possible targets:"
    @grep '^### .*:' $(lastword $(MAKEFILE_LIST)) | sed 's/^### \([^:]*\): \(.*\)/\1:\t\2/' | column -ts "$$(printf '\t')"

### install: Install all files in $PREFIX (used by debian binary package build scripts)
install:
    install -D -o root -g root -m 755 ...
    ...

### release: Increase package version number
release:
    debchange --release

(as usual, the indented files must start with exactly one tabulator but stackoverflow cannot reproduce that detail correctly.)

Output will look like this:

$ make
make: List of possible targets:

help:      Show help message (default target)
install:   Install all files in $PREFIX (used by debian binary package build scripts)
release:   Increase package version number

This works because only lines starting with ### and having a : character are considered as the documentation to output. Note that this intentionally does not extract the actual target name but fully trusts the documentation lines only. This allows always emitting correct output for very complex Makefile tricks, too. Also note that this avoids needing to put the documentation line on any specific position relative to actual rule. I also intentionally avoid sorting the output because the order of output can be fully controlled from the Makefile itself simply by listing the documentation lines in preferred order.

You could obviously invent any other syntax you like and even do something like

### en: install: Install all files in $PREFIX
### fi: asennus: asenna kaikki tiedostot hakemistoon $PREFIX

and only print lines that match the current locale to support multiple languages and having aliases to localize the target names, too:

.PHONY: asennus
asennus: install

The most important question is why do you want to list the targets? Do you want actual documentation or some kind of debugging information?

This is a modification to jsp's very helpful answer (https://stackoverflow.com/a/45843594/814145). I like the idea of getting not only a list of targets but also their descriptions. jsp's Makefile puts the description as the comment, which I found often will be repeated in the target's description echo command. So instead, I extract the description from the echo command for each target.

Example Makefile:

.PHONY: all
all: build
    : "same as 'make build'"

.PHONY: build
build:
    @echo "Build the project"

.PHONY: clean
clean:
    @echo "Clean the project"

.PHONY: help
help:
    @echo -n "Common make targets"
    @echo ":"
    @cat Makefile | sed -n '/^\.PHONY: / h; /\(^\t@*echo\|^\t:\)/ {H; x; /PHONY/ s/.PHONY: \(.*\)\n.*"\(.*\)"/    make \1\t\2/p; d; x}'| sort -k2,2 |expand -t 20

Output of make help:

$ make help
Common make targets:
    make all        same as 'make build'
    make build      Build the project
    make clean      Clean the project
    make help       Common make targets

Notes:

• Same as jsp's answer, only PHONY targets may be listed, which may or may not work for your case
• In addition, it only lists those PHONY targets that have a echo or : command as the first command of the recipe. : means "do nothing". I use it here for those targets that no echo is needed, such as all target above.
• There is an additional trick for the help target to add the ":" in the make help output.

Plenty of workable solutions here, but as I like saying, "if it's worth doing once, it's worth doing again." I did upvote the sugestion to use (tab)(tab), but as some have noted, you may not have completion support, or, if you have many include files, you may want an easier way to know where a target is defined.

I have not tested the below with sub-makes...I think it wouldn't work. As we know, recursive makes considered harmful.

.PHONY: list ls
ls list :
    @# search all include files for targets.
    @# ... excluding special targets, and output dynamic rule definitions unresolved.
    @for inc in $(MAKEFILE_LIST); do \
    echo ' =' $$inc '= '; \
    grep -Eo '^[^\.#[:blank:]]+.*:.*' $$inc | grep -v ':=' | \
    cut -f 1 | sort | sed 's/.*/  &/' | sed -n 's/:.*$$//p' | \
    tr $$ \\\ | tr $(open_paren) % | tr $(close_paren) % \
; done

# to get around escaping limitations:
open_paren := \(
close_paren := \)

Which I like because:

• list targets by include file.
• output raw dynamic target definitions (replaces variable delimiters with modulo)
• output each target on a new line
• seems clearer (subjective opinion)

Explanation:

• foreach file in the MAKEFILE_LIST
• output the name of the file
• grep lines containing a colon, that are not indented, not comments, and don't start with a period
• exclude immediate assignment expressions (:=)
• cut, sort, indent, and chop rule-dependencies (after colon)
• munge variable delimiters to prevent expansion

Sample Output:

 = Makefile = 
  includes
  ls list
 = util/kiss/snapshots.mk = 
  rotate-db-snapshots
  rotate-file-snapshots
  snap-db
  snap-files
  snapshot
 = util/kiss/main.mk = 
  dirs
  install
   %MK_DIR_PREFIX%env-config.php
   %MK_DIR_PREFIX%../srdb

This is a very simplified version of what the bash-completion script does.

make -npq : 2> /dev/null | \
      awk -v RS= -F: '$1 ~ /^[^#%]+$/ { print $1 }'

Explanation:

• make -npq: Print the database without executing anything
• -v RS=: Separate records by whole paragraphs
• -F:: Separate fields by : (so the rule name is $1)
• $1 ~ /^[^#%]+$/: Match rules that don't contain # or % (comments or pattern rules)
• { print $1 }: Print the rule name

This is much simpler than mklement0's approach (which I fixed myself), and works better.

This one was helpful to me because I wanted to see the build targets required (and their dependencies) by the make target. I know that make targets cannot begin with a "." character. I don't know what languages are supported, so I went with egrep's bracket expressions.

cat Makefile | egrep "^[[:alnum:][:punct:]]{0,}:[[:space:]]{0,}[[:alnum:][:punct:][:space:]]{0,}$"

Yet another additional answer to above.

tested on MacOSX using only cat and awk on terminal

cat Makefile | awk '!/SHELL/ && /^[A-z]/ {print $1}' | awk '{print substr($0, 1, length($0)-1)}'

will output of the make file like below:

target1

target2

target3

in the Makefile, it should be the same statement, ensure that you escape the variables using $$variable rather than $variable.

Explanation

cat - spits out the contents

| - pipe parses output to next awk

awk - runs regex excluding "shell" and accepting only "A-z" lines then prints out the $1 first column

awk - yet again removes the last character ":" from the list

this is a rough output and you can do more funky stuff with just AWK. Try to avoid sed as its not as consistent in BSDs variants i.e. some works on *nix but fails on BSDs like MacOSX.

More

You should be able add this (with modifications) to a file for make, to the default bash-completion folder /usr/local/etc/bash-completion.d/ meaning when you "make tab tab" .. it will complete the targets based on the one liner script.

For AWK haters, and for simplicity, this contraption works for me:

help:
  make -qpRr $(lastword $(MAKEFILE_LIST)) | egrep -v '(^(\.|:|#|\s|$)|=)' | cut -d: -f1

(for use outside a Makefile, just remove $(lastword ...) or replace it with the Makefile path).

This solution will not work if you have "interesting" rule names but will work well for most simple setups. The main downside of a make -qp based solution is (as in other answers here) that if the Makefile defines variable values using functions - they will still be executed regardless of -q, and if using $(shell ...) then the shell command will still be called and its side effects will happen. In my setup often the side effects of running shell functions is unwanted output to standard error, so I add 2>/dev/null after the make command.

Here is a version using cat, grep and cut.

cat Makefile | grep : | grep -v '^\t' | cut -d: -f1

Any solution that doesn't get its list from the output of make -p or similar, i.e. tries to parse the targets in the Makefile(s) itself, is going to miss and/or show extra targets. sed, grep, awk, etc., without a pipe from make -p will not be accurate.

Additionally, any solution which requires gnu extensions to sed or grep will likely fail on Mac OS.

Here's my solution for a list target/help target that works on Mac OS (tested on Sonoma and Sequoia with the make that ships with Mac OS, GNU Make 3.81, built for i386-apple-darwin11.3.0) and Linux (tested on AlmaLinux 9.6, GNU Make 4.3, Built for x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu). It's cobbled together from four or five different answers I've found on SO, various mailing lists, and AI answers, and tweaked for my particular style of help (two hashes after the target list), with added support for compound targets and if/ifdef-defined/undefined targets.

It doesn't support variable targets such as $(FOO): bar ## make $FOO from bar or %.o: %.c ## turn a C file into an object file.

It supports cascading/included Makefiles, Makefiles not called Makefile, target definitions with multiple targets in them (e.g.: foo bar: baz ## create either foo or bar from baz), removes hidden targets (.hidden: hidden-file.txt ## don't show this hidden target) and all of the builtin-targets (e.g. .PHONY), removes targets that are if or ifdeffed out (e.g.: ifdef INCLUDE_ME\nmore-stuff: my-stuff ## build more-stuff from my-stuff if INCLUDE_ME is defined\nendif), sorts and de-dups, gives you the user-friendly command to use (basename of the command called, e.g. make, not /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/make), and will cook waffles for you while you wait. Assuming you have that recipe in your Makefile.

It uses xargs with grep to ensure that only the targets that are valid are shown in the output. It also does not show any target that is missing the ## comment goes here in the target definition. So if you haven't commented a target, it won't get shown with this.

Also if you have a compound target where one of the targets is hidden (e.g.: target .hidden-target: ## make this target), neither will be shown in the help list.

If you just want the list of targets without the help messages, remove everything after the { print $$1 }' . No need to pipe to xargs grep and search for commented targets. Note: if you make this change and have a compound target where one is hidden (e.g.: target .hidden-target: ## normal and hidden targets here), the one not hidden will be shown as a valid target.

If you remove everything after the { print $$1 }', you will also get your variable $(FOO): bar targets in the list, but still not your %.o: %.c targets.

.PHONY: help
help: ## Show this help message
    @echo "$(notdir $(MAKE)) targets:"
    @LC_ALL=C $(MAKE) -qp -f $(firstword $(MAKEFILE_LIST)) : 2> /dev/null | awk -v RS= -F: '$$1 ~ /^[^#%. ]+$$/ { print $$1 }' | xargs -I % grep -E '^%(:| [a-zA-Z_ -]+:).*?## .*$$' $(MAKEFILE_LIST) | sort -u | awk 'BEGIN {FS = ":.*?## "}; {printf "\033[36m%-30s\033[0m %s\n", $$1, $$2}'

Example output (ANSI color on a color terminal):

$ make help
make targets:
all run start up               Run the docker containers, if already stopped.  Don't restart if running.
build                          Build the custom docker image(s) needed for this app
composer-help                  Get details about calling composer
composer                       Run a composer command (composer-help for help)
debug-off                      Disable PHP debugging in the web container
debug-on                       Enable PHP debugging in the web container
drush-help                     Get details about calling drush
drush                          Run a drush command (drush-help for help)
help                           Show this help message
rb rebuild                     Recreate and restart the docker containers
rerun restart rr               (Re)start the docker containers
sqlc                           Connect to the db container via the mysql CLI
ssh-db                         SSH into the db container
ssh                            SSH into the web container
stop                           Stop the docker containers

I was inspired by @jsp's answer to adapt his file parsing technique and this version has the following benefits.

• Automatically detects makefile name
• Supports section headers with bold text
• Places .PHONY below each section header for all targets within that section and places comments after the target so it's a little cleaner to look at.
• Supports hidden targets when comments are prefixed with # Hidden;

Given a makefile like this

#=Default Command

.PHONY: help

help: # Shows the available make commands.
    @sed -nr \
        -e '/# Hidden;/d' \
        -e 's|^#=(.*)|\n\x1b[1m\1:\x1b[0m|p' \
        -e 's|^([a-zA-Z-]*):((.*?)# (.*))?|  \1 \4|p' \
        $(firstword $(MAKEFILE_LIST)) \
        | expand -t30

#=Project Commands

.PHONY: install build

install: # Installs the thing
    @echo install

build: install # Builds the thing
    @echo build

#=Other Commands

.PHONY: foo bar

foo:
    @echo foo

bar:
    @echo bar

You'll get output like this

Default Command:
  help              Shows the available make commands.

Project Commands:
  install           Installs the thing
  build             Builds the thing

Other Commands:
  foo
  bar

Regex explanations:
'/# Hidden;/d' Deletes any lines containing # Hidden; to enable hiding internal targets.

's|^#=(.*)|\n\1:|p' Captures everything in parens after section declaration #= and prints it \1 with a newline before and colon after it. The extended version 's|^#=(.*)|\n\x1b[1m\1:\x1b[0m|p' includes the escape codes for bold text.

's|^([a-zA-Z-]*):((.*?)# (.*))?| \1 \4|p' Captures target name and includes an optional capture group ()? for the description. The optional group surrounds two more capture groups, the first one capturing everything between : and # and the second capturing the help text (aside: the regex is a bit complicated but it lets us output targets with and without comments. Open to better methods). Finally it outputs the target name \1 and description \4 indented 2 spaces to tuck it under the section header.

tl;dr I personally copy-paste the same help target for every Makefile I build.

.SILENT:

.PHONY: help
## This help screen
help:
    printf "Available targets\n\n"
    awk '/^[a-zA-Z\-\_0-9]+:/ { \
        helpMessage = match(lastLine, /^## (.*)/); \
        if (helpMessage) { \
            helpCommand = substr($$1, 0, index($$1, ":")-1); \
            helpMessage = substr(lastLine, RSTART + 3, RLENGTH); \
            printf "%-30s %s\n", helpCommand, helpMessage; \
        } \
    } \
    { lastLine = $$0 }' $(MAKEFILE_LIST)

I also maintain a copy of it in this Github gist: https://gist.github.com/Olshansk/689fc2dee28a44397c6e31a0776ede30

Very simple AWK solution:

all:
    @awk -F'[ :]' '!/^all:/ && /^([A-z_-]+):/ {print "make " $$1}' Makefile

(Note: This doesn't cover all the corner-cases as the accepted answer, as explained here.)

Try this one:

make -qp | awk -F':' '/^[^ \t.%][-A-Za-z0-9_]*:/ {split($0,A,/ /);for(i in A)if(match(A[i],/^[^.%][-A-Za-z0-9_]*/))print substr(A[i],1,RLENGTH)}' | sort -u

I usually do:

grep install_targets Makefile

It would come back with something like:

install_targets = install-xxx1 install-xxx2 ... etc

I hope this helps