How to find the line number of an error in a Makefile?

Question

I am running the following command:

make -f makefile.gcc

And the output is:

make: -c: Command not found

How can I find out which line is causing the error? The makefile is hundreds of lines long and there's no way of figuring it out otherwise.

I tried the -d switch, but that didn't print any useful information.

Answer 1

This might help you locate what goes wrong if you do run strace on the make command. Then you can search the makefile for that afterwards.

Here's a link to a post about strace: http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2006/05/strace-very-powerful-troubleshooting.html

Answer 2

It seems like the problem is that the makefile contain paths with '\' in them and since I'm running on Linux, that's going to be a problem.

I'm still working on a solution for that.