Makefile Verification (verify target)#

The verify target in the Makefile is a no-op — it prints "Verify disabled" and exits successfully without running any checks:

verify:
    @echo "Verify disabled"

It is listed as a dependency of the all target (all: clean build verify), so every full build silently passes verification regardless of content state. There is no evidence in the repository that active validation logic ever existed here; the target has been disabled since the Makefile was first committed.

Impact: Undetected Content Regressions#

Because verify does nothing, content regressions accumulate undetected. Known examples reported in the repository include 1:

• EN DASH / EM DASH characters (U+2013, U+2014) substituted for ASCII hyphens in shell commands — causes docker: invalid reference format and container naming errors at runtime. The recommended detection command is grep -rnP '[\x{2013}\x{2014}]' content/.
• Missing line continuations — broken multi-line shell examples in course content 2.
• Incompatible Dockerfile syntax — BusyBox-specific syntax used on Ubuntu base images 3.
• Invalid Goss test resources — test definitions referencing non-existent resource types that silently pass 4.

These issues cannot be caught by visual review; they require automated checks in verify.

How to Fix#

The proposed fix 1 is to populate the verify target with grep-based guards. At minimum, add:

verify:
    @grep -rnP '[\x{2013}\x{2014}]' content/ && { echo "ERROR: EN/EM dash found in content"; exit 1; } || true

The target is already declared .PHONY, so no build-system changes are needed beyond adding commands to the target body.

Related Targets#

Primary source: Makefile