Make error: missing separator

问题:

I am getting the following error running make:

Makefile:168: *** missing separator.  Stop.

What is causing this?

回答1:

As indicated in the online manual, the most common cause for that error is that lines are indented with whitespaces when make expects tab characters.

Correct

target: 
\\tcmd

where \\t is TAB

Wrong

target:
    cmd

回答2:

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. ($eval $(call... rather than $(eval $(call....

回答3:

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.

回答4:

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.

回答5:

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 \\ <-- 0x20 there caused the error.
   val2

回答6:

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))

回答7:

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.

回答8:

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...

回答9:

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.

回答10:

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