Is there a way to reassign Makefile variable value inside of the target body? What I am trying to do is to add some extra flags for debug compilation: %.erl: %.beam $(ERLC) $(ERLFLAGS) -o ebin $< test: clean debug_compile_flag compile compile_test debug_compile: $(ERLCFLAGS) += -DTEST So if I invoke test target I would like to clean up my environment, add some new flags (like -DTEST to the existing ones), compile the whole code once again (first sources, then test modules). I do not want to copy/paste the code for compiling with some new flags set since there is a lot of logic put here and there. Is there some easy way to redefine the variable value so I can reuse the existing code?