Make error: missing separator - makefile

Question

I am getting the following error running make:
Makefile:168: *** missing separator. Stop.
What is causing this?

Answer 1

As indicated in the online manual, the most common cause for that error is that lines are indented with spaces when make expects tab characters.
Correct
target:
\tcmd
where \t is TAB (U+0009)
Wrong
target:
....cmd
where each . represents a SPACE (U+0020).

Answer 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 $(call function,args))
i.e. ($ rather than $(.

Answer 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.

Answer 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.

Answer 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

Answer 6

In my case, I was actually missing a tab in between ifeq and the command on the next line. No spaces were there to begin with.
ifeq ($(wildcard $DIR_FILE), )
cd $FOLDER; cp -f $DIR_FILE.tpl $DIR_FILE.xs;
endif
Should have been:
ifeq ($(wildcard $DIR_FILE), )
<tab>cd $FOLDER; cp -f $DIR_FILE.tpl $DIR_FILE.xs;
endif
Note the <tab> is an actual tab character

Answer 7

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))

Answer 8

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.

Answer 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.

Answer 10

I had the missing separator file in Makefiles generated by qmake. I was porting Qt code to a different platform. I didn't have QMAKESPEC nor MAKE set. Here's the link I found the answer:
https://forum.qt.io/topic/3783/missing-separator-error-in-makefile/5

Answer 11

Just to add yet another reason this can show up:
$(eval VALUE)
is not valid and will produce a "missing separator" error.
$(eval IDENTIFIER=VALUE)
is acceptable. This sort of error showed up for me when I had an macro defined with define and tried to do
define SOME_MACRO
... some expression ...
endef
VAR=$(eval $(call SOME_MACRO,arg))
where the macro did not evaluate to an assignment.

Answer 12

I had this because I had no colon after PHONY
Not this,
.PHONY install
install:
install -m0755 bin/ytdl-clean /usr/local/bin
But this (notice the colon)
.PHONY: install
...

Answer 13

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

Answer 14

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...