Question

I want to use the same complex block of recipes for an implicit and a normal rule.
Also, I want make to echo the next command AFTER thre previous command executed.

Make does not allow mixing implicit and normal rules.

Desired output:

$ make foo bar.abc
echo a
a
echo b
b
echo a
a
echo b
b

This won’t work:

%.abc foo:
    echo a
    echo b

This will work:

CMD = echo a && echo b
foo:
    $(CMD)

%.abc:
    $(CMD)

but the output is not what I want:

$ make foo bar.abc
echo a && echo b
a
b
echo a && echo b
a
b

Answer 1

You can use define to assign multi-line values to variables:

define CMD
echo a
echo b
endef