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Special Characters in a Makefile

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To use an NMAKE special character as a literal character, place a caret (^) in front of it. NMAKE ignores carets that precede other characters. The special characters are:

:  ;  #  (  )  $  ^  \  {  }  !  @  —

A caret (^) within a quoted string is treated as a literal caret character. A caret at the end of a line inserts a literal newline character in a string or macro.

In macros, a backslash (\) followed by a newline character is replaced by a space.

In commands, a percent symbol (%) is a file specifier. To represent % literally in a command, specify a double percent sign (%%) in place of a single one. In other situations, NMAKE interprets a single % literally, but it always interprets a double %% as a single %. Therefore, to represent a literal %%, specify either three percent signs, %%%, or four percent signs, %%%%.

To use the dollar sign ($) as a literal character in a command, specify two dollar signs ($$). This method can also be used in other situations where ^$ works.