Using a build system for reproducible research?

I am doing a research project that involves a pipeline of programs, each generating an output file that becomes the input for the next program. I would like to make it easy to repeat the series of commands that I used to create the desired output. It seems like make or any other build system would be a good 开发者_StackOverflowfit for this task, but all the build systems that I've looked at (except for maybe make itself) seem to be strongly biased toward building executabe files from source code, and I can't figure out how to do anything else with them. Does anyone have experience using a build system for tasks other than compiling source code into executables? Can I easily use a build system to facilitate reproducible research, or should I be looking for a different kind of tool?

Well, I figured this out by myself eventually. I'm using plain old (GNU) Makefiles.