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12.8 The Make Macro MAKEFLAGS
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Posix requires ‘make’ to use ‘MAKEFLAGS’ to affect the current and
recursive invocations of make, but allows implementations several
formats for the variable.  It is tricky to parse ‘$MAKEFLAGS’ to
determine whether ‘-s’ for silent execution or ‘-k’ for continued
execution are in effect.  For example, you cannot assume that the first
space-separated word in ‘$MAKEFLAGS’ contains single-letter options,
since in the Cygwin version of GNU ‘make’ it is either ‘--unix’ or
‘--win32’ with the second word containing single-letter options.

     $ cat Makefile
     all:
             @echo MAKEFLAGS = $(MAKEFLAGS)
     $ make
     MAKEFLAGS = --unix
     $ make -k
     MAKEFLAGS = --unix -k