Make error missing separator

Question

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

User · Answer

Just to add yet another reason this can show up:

$(eval VALUE)

is not valid and will produce a "missing separator" 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

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

User · Answer

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

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

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

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

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

User · Answer

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

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

User · Answer

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

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

User · Answer

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

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

[makefile] Make error: missing separator

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