How do I see the commands that are run by GNU make?

Question

I'm trying to debug a complex Makefile. How do you get GNU make to print all the commands it runs? I couldn't find the answer in the man page (using the -d flag doesn't seem to print it).

(This isn't necessary information to answer my question, but in case you're wondering: I'm having trouble compiling a project built on NVIDIA's CUDA library. I can compile it myself, but using their Makefile results in a nasty compiler error. I'd like to use their provided Makefile for easier packaging, and inclusion of other packages that they link in already.)

Answer 1

-n triggers a "dry run" in which no command is executed, though the commands which would execute are printed.

If your Makefile is recursive, though, this won't help much.