Word Unexpected (expecting “)”) with Makefile

Question

I'm making a makefile and I'm working on a target with no dependencies that checks to see if a file named README exists in the current directory and if it does, read it using less or else exit quitely: give no errors whatsoever--the command to run the target should print nothing to console if this is the case.

I've tried a couple different ways but nothing really seems to work (PAGER is simply a var equal to less):

read :
   ifneq ("$(wildcard README)","")
      -@$(PAGER) README
   endif

And also with this code

read :
   -@for file in *;\
   do \
       if [ ${file} == "README" ]; then\
           $(PAGER) "README" ;\
       fi;\
   done

With the first chunk I keep getting an error akin to /bin/sh: Syntax error: word unexpected (expecting ")") and for the life of me I just don't get what it's saying. I certainly don't think there's a syntax error, perhaps I'm misusing make.

For the latter code I get an unexpected operator error for the ==.

I've also tried simpler things like these two single liner solutions but get similar errors:

-@test -a README && less README
-@[ -a README ] && less README

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I was digging further and saw something promising and explicitly setting my shell to /bin/bash (SHELL := /bin/bash) yet no dice.

Answer 1

read:
        @if [ -e README ]; then less README; fi

Answer 2

You should try to extract your shell code in separate *.sh files so that you can specify them as commands in your makefile (and make sure that the *.sh files are executable).