Log invoked commands of make

Question

Is there a way to log the commands, make invokes to compile a program? I know of the parameters -n and -p, but they either don't resolve if-conditions but just print them out. Or they don't work, when there are calls to 'make' itself in the Makefile.

Answer 1

Make writes each command it executes to the console, so

make 2>&1 | tee build.log

will create a log file named build.log as a side effect which contains the same stuff written to the screen. (man tee for more details.)

2>&1 combines standard output and errors into one stream. If you didn't include that, regular output would go into the log file but errors would only go to the console. (make only writes to stderr when a command returns an error code.)

If you want to suppress output entirely in favor of logging to a file, it's even simpler:

make 2>&1 > build.log

Because these just capture console output they work just fine with recursive make.