Follow-up Comment #2, bug #62595 (project make): Hi Paul
.env files are commonly used for specifying secrets for an application or a build. Please see this question to get an idea of how people are currently trying to use .env files in their Makefile: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/235223/makefile-include-env-file The format of a .env file is simply "key=value". From the make.env project I linked to, here is what a typical file may look like APP_PASSWORD='8oyy!r#vNpRy2TT' FOO_BAR='4dabfs#a%d73w$Z2TBN4!nYD4Y$TW' TEST_VAR='8X46Yj*aek3GQeiW7#bK!Eg@#6vjV' ANOTHER_VAR='"hello world' --- In the above case, the single quotes surrounding the value are to be ignored, but everything else is to be taken literally. Some .env parsers take it a step further and also expand environment variables within the .env file, so values that are surrounded by double quotes and have $ symbol inside are expanded and the result is what is stored as part of the value. ex. user="$USER" expands to user="username". The solution I settled on for the make.env project is to convert each of those lines to "export KEY:='$(value VALUE)'", then load them into make using the --eval flag. This was the only way I found that reliably loads the value into make without make attempting to interpret the value. I hope that clears things up _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62595> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/