I think shell script can work as well as makefile in most cases. The pro of shell script is not having one more tool for running your commands. You have a shell, why do you need make for describing build steps?
For the moment I see a makefile as a shell script that fails when a command fails. But you can use `-e` option with sh, bash, rc shells and expect the same behaviour.
The only thing shell misses (comparing to makefile) is dependencies check, you have to write dependencies mechanism yourself if you need it.
Also I don't like the .PHONY stuff, I just can't get it, it feels alien.
I just started learning about Make today, but according to the other comments in this post, there are lots of differences, like incremental builds and parallelism. It also checks things like file modification dates and whatnot.
