Make error missing separator

Question

I am getting the following error running make   Makefile 168      missing separator   Stop    What is causing this

User · Answer

In my case error caused next  I ve tried to execute commands globally i e outside of any target   UPD  To run command globally one must be properly formed  For example command   ln -sf       user curl  SRC NAME    SRC NAME   would become     shell ln -sf       user curl   SRC NAME      SRC NAME

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Following Makefile code worked   obj-m   hello o  all        MAKE  -C  lib modules   shell uname -r  build M   PWD  modules   clean        MAKE  -C  lib modules   shell uname -r  build M   PWD  clean

User · Answer

This is a syntax error in your Makefile  It s quite hard to be more specific than that  without seeing the file itself  or relevant portion s  thereof

User · Answer

For me  the problem was that I had some end-of-line       comments embedded within a define     endef multi-line variable definition   Removing the comments made the problem go away

User · Answer

As indicated in the online manual  the most common cause for that error is that lines are indented with spaces  when make expects tab characters  Correct target    tcmd  where  t is TAB  U 0009  Wrong target      cmd  where each   represents a SPACE  U 0020

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In my case  I was actually missing a tab in between ifeq and the command on the next line   No spaces were there to begin with   ifeq    wildcard  DIR FILE     cd  FOLDER  cp -f  DIR FILE tpl  DIR FILE xs  endif   Should have been   ifeq    wildcard  DIR FILE      lt tab gt cd  FOLDER  cp -f  DIR FILE tpl  DIR FILE xs  endif   Note the  lt tab gt  is an actual tab character

User · Answer

My error was on a variable declaration line with a multi-line extension  I have a trailing space after the     which made that an invalid line continuation   MY VAR        val1    lt -- 0x20 there caused the error     val2

User · Answer

Just for grins  and in case somebody else runs into a similar error   I got the infamous  missing separator  error because I had invoked a rule defining a function as    eval   call function args     rather than     eval   call function args     i e     rather than

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In my case  the same error was caused because colon  was missing at end as in staging deploy   So note that it can be easy syntax mistake

User · Answer

Just to add yet another reason this can show up    eval VALUE   is not valid and will produce a  quot missing separator quot  error    eval IDENTIFIER VALUE   is acceptable  This sort of error showed up for me when I had an macro defined with define and tried to do define SOME MACRO     some expression     endef  VAR   eval   call SOME MACRO arg    where the macro did not evaluate to an assignment

User · Answer

I had the missing separator file in Makefiles generated by qmake  I was porting Qt code to a different platform  I didn t have QMAKESPEC nor MAKE set   Here s the link I found the answer    https   forum qt io topic 3783 missing-separator-error-in-makefile 5

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So apparently  all I needed was the  build-essential  package  then to run autoconf first  which made the Makefile pre in  then the   configure then the make which works perfectly

User · Answer

In my case  this error was caused by the lack of a mere space  I had this if block in my makefile   if   METHOD  opt  CFLAGS  endif   which should have been   if    METHOD  opt  CFLAGS  endif   with a space after if

[makefile] Make error: missing separator

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