10.10 Limitations of Make

Make itself suffers a great number of limitations, only a few of which being listed here. First of all, remember that since commands are executed by the shell, all its weaknesses are inherited...

$<

POSIX says that the `$<' construct in makefiles can be used only in inference rules and in the `.DEFAULT' rule; its meaning in ordinary rules is unspecified. Solaris 8's make for instance will replace it with the argument.

Leading underscore in macro names

Some Make don't support leading underscores in macro names, such as on NEWS-OS 4.2R.

$ cat Makefile _am_include = # _am_quote = all:; @echo this is test $ make Make: Must be a separator on rules line 2. Stop. $ cat Makefile2 am_include = # am_quote = all:; @echo this is test $ make -f Makefile2 this is test

VPATH

Don't use it! For instance any assignment to VPATH causes Sun make to only execute the first set of double-colon rules.