Re: Quoting special characters

[David Boyce]

On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 10:43 AM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> It might be better to use a quoting regime that exploits the shell
>> rather than an independent quoting regime that operates entirely outside
>> the shell.  People who write makefiles need to know the shell quoting
>> rules already, so if 'make' uses compatible quoting rules it'd be one
>> less thing to learn.
>
> Exactly my thoughts.

I don't agree. Recent enhancements have set make free from the
presumption that the value of $(SHELL) is even a shell as commonly
understood. Nowadays the recipe text can be passed blindly to whatever
program is assigned to SHELL using the flags assigned to .SHELLFLAGS.
True, there may be very few true shells which don't understand POSIX
quoting but that cannot be said of the entire universe of programs
modern make may pass its recipes to.