pretty print makefiles

Question

The linux kernel (and various other projects including git) have very nice makefiles that hide the giant cc calls into nice little acronyms.

For example:

Answer 1

You can prepend @ to calls in the makefile targets.

E.g.:

%.o: %.c
    @$(CC) $(CFLAGS) -c -o $@ $<
    @echo "CC $<"

Answer 2

For a much more complicated makefile, you could use a Python script to capture the output in realtime and process it however you like, and then print them in realtime: example.