CODEWITHSUNDEEP
makefilecmakesyntax-error
alchemist
alchemist

Reputation: 1

Building libssh project - target pattern contains no '%'

I'm trying to install libssh-0.8.5 onto Ubuntu 16.04 using the instructions from the install.readme provided. I follow every step as stated, but I get an error after executing the make command to build the project. The error is as follows:

[ 65%] Built target exec
tests/CMakeFiles/ssh_ping.dir/flags.make:8: *** target pattern contains no '%'.  Stop.
CMakeFiles/Makefile2:1696: recipe for target 'tests/CMakeFiles/ssh_ping.dir/all' failed
make[1 ]: *** [tests/CMakeFiles/ssh_ping.dir/all] Error 2
Makefile:160: recipe for target 'all' failed
make: *** [all] Error 2

Image of Error

I have researched and seen that it could be a syntax error somewhere in my make file that is preventing the build to continue. I have looked at the target make file giving the problem, but cant seem to identify what is causing the error.

The flag.make file is as follows:

Flag.make file

The problem seems to be coming from the highlighted bold line. Can anyone see what I am missing?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1483

Answers (2)

Renaud Pacalet
Renaud Pacalet

Reputation: 29290

Apparently ssh wasn't installed properly on your platform, while cmake relies on it. I am a bit surprised that cmake itself did not raise an error when generating flag.make but as I don't use cmake I do not know whether it is its normal behaviour or not.

Anyway, when cmake tried to detect your version of OpenSSH it did it by running ssh and got an error message instead of the version number it wanted. This error message got inserted in the generated flag.make Makefile. Because the second line of this error message (I could copy-paste it here if it was not in a picture in your question) has the:

a: b: c

form, make tried to interpret it as a static pattern rule but as it contains no % wildcard character, make raised a syntax error.

What happens if you try to run /usr/bin/ssh -V on the command line?

Upvotes: 0

MadScientist
MadScientist

Reputation: 101041

On StackOverflow (and most other similar sites), please cut and paste text into your questions and format them using the proper markdown facilities, rather than attaching images containing text. The latter is difficult to read and we can't cut and paste it into our answer to show where things are going wrong.

You cannot embed newlines in quoted strings, in makefiles. Make is completely line-oriented and does not parse quotes at all. So to make this:

FOO = "bar
biz"

is not considered one line assigning a value containing a newline to a variable FOO. Instead, it's considered two lines, the first of which is assigning the value "bar to variable FOO and the second of which is a syntax error since make can't parse the string baz" as a valid command.

Upvotes: 2

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