%% Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: mk> The GNU make 3.80 manual lacks a section on quoting of special mk> characters that describes how any arbitrary byte sequence can be mk> provided as a prerequisite or a target in a rule.
There is no way to do this, which is why it's not described in the manual. mk> So I have to escape the :: somehow. But how? You can't. mk> Giving up ... Is there a way to specify an arbitrary sequence of mk> 8-bit bytes (other than those containing \0) as a target? No. mk> Having :: as part of a target is a perfectly normal thing under mk> Unix, e.g. for man pages of Perl classes. Unfortunately, spaces and colons are not supported in filenames handled by make. mk> I believe that the ability to specify any arbitrary filename in a mk> Make file is so important that any esoteric backwards mk> compatibility problems that a solution to this problem might mk> create would be quite justifyable. Fundamental tools, including mk> make, really need 100% filename transparency using a simple and mk> well-documented quoting mechanism. That would be a good thing, but it's not that simple. While quoting colons would probably be doable in GNU make, although as you point out not really backward compatibly, handling whitespace in a really robust way would probably require rewriting virtually all the internals of make. Make is basically a big string handler, and strings are chopped up into words (based on whitespace) all the time, multiple times per string, in many various contexts. To get it "really" right you'd probably need to replace all that simple string handling with some kind of "smart string". Actually I had one idea that could be implemented without redoing all of make's internals, but it would block off at least one and probably two or more different 8-bit values from appearing in makefiles. In an i18n world I don't know if this is acceptable. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul D. Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Find some GNU make tips at: http://www.gnu.org http://make.paulandlesley.org "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist _______________________________________________ Bug-make mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-make