CODEWITHSUNDEEP
debuggingmakefileevalgnu-make
Digital Trauma
Digital Trauma

Reputation: 16016

How to find error line in eval of multi-line variable definition

Suppose I have the following Makefile with an intentional error in line 4:

define TEMPLATE
all:

this line contains some errors
endef

$(eval $(call TEMPLATE))

When I run I get this:

$ make-3.81
Makefile:7: *** missing separator.  Stop.
$

Make is telling me that there is an error in line 7, which is technically correct because the TEMPLATE variable is expanded on line 7. But this is not tremendously useful. In order to quickly debug this sort of thing it would be much more handy if could somehow point me directly to the error on line 4. Is there any way to do this?

In case it makes any difference, this is GNU make-3.81.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 408

Answers (1)

Eric Melski
Eric Melski

Reputation: 16840

Electric Make, a high-performance GNU-make-compatible implementation of make, reports errors the way you want:

$ cat Makefile 
define BOGUS
foo: bar
    abcd

endef

$(eval $(BOGUS))
$ gmake
Makefile:7: *** missing separator.  Stop.
$ emake
Makefile:7:eval:2: *** missing separator.  Stop.

It's a commercial product, but you can download a free version from Electric Cloud.

Disclaimer: I am the architect of Electric Make

Upvotes: 1

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