I can't find any method to pass variables to the Makefile other than by the environment, but

• It's simple and clean to pass environment variable to the Makefile
• It's simple and clean to use environment variable in the Makefile (in sh, ksh, bash and zsh at least)
• The environment variables can be passed to the Perl script as arguments even if they were passed to the Makefile as environment variables.

$ cat echo.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
print("$ARGV[0]\n");

$ cat Makefile
testing:
        echo.pl $(TEXT) > $@

$ TEXT=moo make testing
echo.pl moo > testing

$ cat testing
moo
[download]

I feel this meets your needs. If not, let us know how it doesn't.

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