> Date: Fri, 3 May 2013 10:22:40 +0200 > From: Erik Carstensen <mandolae...@gmail.com> > Cc: make-w32@gnu.org > > > Make on Windows cannot support escaping with backslash when the shell > > is cmd.exe. And Make in general doesn't support file names with > > whitespace too well, you need to introduce blanks via variables, for > > it to work reliably. The only place where it works well is in the > > command line itself, but not in variables and certainly not in > > dependency lists. > > > My findings: > - Space in filenames does work very well in variables, as long as the > variables are used exclusively in command lines. > - You are right that it can be tricky to introduce a leading space, but not > really a big problem. Most people tend to store the space in an > intermediate variable (the space=$(empty) $(empty) trick)', but I found > that it's sufficient to just write 'foo=$() xyz' > - Dependency lists are not a big problem, you just have to escape spaces > and backslashes properly. It is (fairly) easy to write a function that does > this. Automatic variables like $@, $< and $^ will be un-escaped, so any > uses need to be re-quoted or surrounded by double quotes. This is > practically doable, if you have a limited set of directories that may > contain space. > - The only big remaining problem is that there is no way to add a path with > spaces to VPATH. I have a poor workaround for this (copying needed > directories to a space-free path before adding them to VPATH). We should > probably be grateful that a VPATH path cannot contain spaces; e.g., it > guarantees that %.c always expands to a space-free path.
I agree with all your findings, and they are identical to mine. But that is exactly the meaning of "doesn't support file names with whitespace too well": it sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, sometimes you can work around the problems with a lot of trial-and-error, sometimes you can't, no matter what. IOW, it's unreliable and is best avoided. _______________________________________________ Make-w32 mailing list Make-w32@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/make-w32
