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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...

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 @command{make} to only execute the first set of double-colon rules.

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