multiple target patterns Makefile error

Question

My makefile fails with error   Makefile 34      multiple target patterns   Stop    What does it really mean  how can I fix this     GNU make manual  written by Captain Obvious  isn t helping      Found it  I had rule in form     FOO   bar   where FOO was set from shell command that polluted it with error message that contained a colon

User · Answer

I also got this error  within the Eclipse-based STM32CubeIDE on Windows   After double-clicking on the  quot multiple target patterns quot  error it showed a path to a  ld file  It turns out to be another  quot illegal character quot  problem  The offending character was the  wait for it     Heuristic of the week  use only  a  z  in your paths  as there are bound to be other illegal characters  lt  vomit gt   The GNU make manual doesn t explicitly document this

User · Answer

I just want to add  if you get this error because you are using Cygwin make and auto-generated files  you can fix it with the following sed   sed -e  s              1 g  -e  s  cC    cygdrive c   -i filename d   You may need to add more characters than just space to the escape list in the first substitution but you get the idea  The concept here is that  cygdrive c is an alias for c  that cygwin s make will recognize   And may as well throw in  -e  s       t     just in case you did start with spaces on accident  although I  think  this will usually be a  missing separator  error

User · Answer

I met with the same error   After struggling  I found that it was due to  Space  in the folder name   For example    Earlier My folder name was     Qt Projects    Later I changed it to    QtProjects   and my issue was resolved   Its very simple but sometimes a major issue

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I had it on the Makefile  MAPS  reverse db 901 550 2001 ip6 arpa  lastserial     MAPS        updateser   MAPS    It s because of the   in the file name  I solved this with                         -------- notice                                                 v    v MAPS  reverse db 901  550  2001 ip6 arpa lastserial     MAPS        updateser   MAPS

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I had this problem  colons in the target name  because I had -n in my GREP OPTIONS environment variable  Apparently  this caused configure to generate the Makefile incorrectly

User · Answer

My IDE left a mix of spaces and tabs in my Makefile  Setting my Makefile to use only tabs fixed this error for me

User · Answer

Besides having to escape colons as in the original answer  I have found if the indentation is off you could potentially get the same problem   In one makefile  I had to replace spaces with a tab and that allowed me to get past the error

[makefile] "multiple target patterns" Makefile error

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