Capturing output of unix commands in Makefile

[Vibhu AV]

I am interested in capturing the output of a Unix comand, say "date", 
within a makefile. I would like to assign the output to
a variable within the Makefile to use it and manipulate it.

For example, here is conceptually what I would like to do:

timeRun:
        T1 = output of date
        Run a looong job
        T2 = output of date
        timeDiff.pl T1 T2 # To get the diff between times T1 and T2


Can this be done within make?