Re: Limiting expansion of make variables

[Paul Smith]

On Tue, 2017-04-18 at 17:28 +0200, Richard Cavell wrote:
> It seems to make no difference to make whether I use single or double
> quotes.
> dumpvars: foo.o bar.o foobar
>        @echo '$$(RM) is :' $(RM)
>        @echo "$$^ is :" $^

This is because "$^" is not a valid shell variable, so the shell just
passes it along without change.

But if you use:

  echo "$$(RM) is :" $(RM)

then the shell will try to run the command "RM" which likely doesn't
exist.  Here you need the backslash.

However, it's best to always use single quotes in make recipes.  It
guards you against virtually all types of special characters (except
single quotes themselves) and it doesn't matter to make, since make
pays no attention to quotes of any type.