Replace characters in Makefile target

Question

I'm trying to use

$(patsubst %-%,%:%,$(MAKECMDGOALS))

to replace dashes with colons in the make target but it has no effect.

How could I achieve this?

Answer 1

You can only have a single wildcard in patsubst. To replace all dashes with colons, you can use subst:

$(subst -,:,$(MAKECMDGOALS))

Answer 2

Use the tr command:

tr '-' ':' < OLD_MAKE_TARGET > NEW_MAKE_TARGET