I would like recipes in GNU Make to use environment variables instead of command line arguments, to make them shorter, so that I can concentrate better on what changes in each command. For example, instead of seeing:

g++ -g -I/path1 -I/path2 -DFLAG  -Wall -c hello.cpp -o hello.o

I would like to see something like:

g++ -c hello.cpp -o hello.o

where g++ would read include directories and everything else from environment variables. Therefore, instead of using this:

compile.cxx = $(CXX) $(CXXFLAGS) $(CPPFLAGS) -c

%.o: %.cpp
    $(compile.cxx) $< -o $@

I am using this:

compile.cxx = CXXFLAGS="$(CXXFLAGS)" CPPFLAGS="$(CPPFLAGS)" bash -c $(CXX) -c

%.o: %.cpp
    $(compile.cxx) $< -o $@

But I get this output:

CXXFLAGS="irrelevant" CPPFLAGS="irrelevant" bash -c g++ -c hello.cpp -o hello.o
g++: fatal error: no input files

Hence, it seems that g++ does not receive its arguments.