Re: make with full qualified path names containing spaces

[John Graham-Cumming]

Jürgen Schmidt wrote:
> can anybody tell me if it is possible to use full qualified paths 
> containing spaces for any kind of targets? I tried to quote it but 
> without any success. I am mainly interested inWindows but also for
> Unix.

In general "No".  Since GNU Make considers space to be a list separator
it's generally very hard to work with spaces in path names.   Since this
subject comes up a lot I suggest you search the GNU Make mailing list
archives for more detailed responses.

You can escape space with a backslash but that's not going to keep the
space escaped everywhere because GNU Make isn't consistent about this.
Essentially the correct answer to using spaces in filenames in GNU Make
(no matter what platform) is "Don't".

To quote the GNU Make 3.80 README.W32 file:

"Unlike Unix, Windows 95/NT systems encourage pathnames which
contain white space (e.g. C:\Program Files\). These sorts of
pathnames
are legal under Unix too, but are never encouraged. There is
at least one place in make (VPATH/vpath handling) where paths
containing white space will simply not work. There may be others
too. I chose to not try and port make in such a way so that
these sorts of paths could be handled. I offer these suggestions
as workarounds:

1. Use 8.3 notation
2. Rename the directory so it does not contain white space.

If you are unhappy with this choice, this is free software
and you are free to take a crack at making this work. The code
in w32/pathstuff.c and vpath.c would be the places to start."

John.
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John Graham-Cumming
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