"multiple target patterns" Makefile error

90
votes

My makefile fails with error:

Makefile:34: *** multiple target patterns.  Stop.

What does it really mean, how can I fix this?

(GNU make manual, written by Captain Obvious, isn't helping).

Found it. I had rule in form:

$(FOO): bar

where FOO was set from shell command that polluted it with error message that contained a colon.

7
makefile
does www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21119863 or sourceware.org/ml/crossgcc/2009-07/msg00006.html help? - Alok Singhal
A swift google reveals groups.google.com/group/gnu.utils.help/browse_frm/thread/… - anon
These answers are just paraphrases of "you've got multiple target patterns". Well, I think I don't. How can I check it? What can trigger it? What precautions are needed to prevent this problem? - Kornel
Everything was working one minute and then my script sneezed out a (semi)colon... heheh. Sweated it out trying to find the problem for at least 3 hours before I found your and @mcr 's answer. You just saved me a bucketful of sweat!! - GuruM
The true root cause of this problem is GNU Make being a horrible piece of dung that should have died decades ago. - antred

7 Answers

68
votes

I had it on the Makefile

MAPS+=reverse/db.901:550:2001.ip6.arpa 
lastserial:  ${MAPS}
    ./updateser ${MAPS}

It's because of the : in the file name. I solved this with

                      -------- notice
                     /    /
                    v    v
MAPS+=reverse/db.901\:550\:2001.ip6.arpa
lastserial:  ${MAPS}
    ./updateser ${MAPS}
24
votes

Besides having to escape colons as in the original answer, I have found if the indentation is off you could potentially get the same problem. In one makefile, I had to replace spaces with a tab and that allowed me to get past the error.

4
votes

I just want to add, if you get this error because you are using Cygwin make and auto-generated files, you can fix it with the following sed,

sed -e 's@\\\([^ ]\)@/\1@g' -e 's@[cC]:@/cygdrive/c@' -i filename.d

You may need to add more characters than just space to the escape list in the first substitution but you get the idea. The concept here is that /cygdrive/c is an alias for c: that cygwin's make will recognize.

And may as well throw in

-e 's@^ \+@\t@'

just in case you did start with spaces on accident (although I /think/ this will usually be a "missing separator" error).

3
votes

I met with the same error. After struggling, I found that it was due to "Space" in the folder name.

For example :

Earlier My folder name was : "Qt Projects"

Later I changed it to : "QtProjects"

and my issue was resolved.

Its very simple but sometimes a major issue.

1
votes

My IDE left a mix of spaces and tabs in my Makefile.

Setting my Makefile to use only tabs fixed this error for me.

0
votes

I had this problem (colons in the target name) because I had -n in my GREP_OPTIONS environment variable. Apparently, this caused configure to generate the Makefile incorrectly.

0
votes

I also got this error (within the Eclipse-based STM32CubeIDE on Windows).

After double-clicking on the "multiple target patterns" error it showed a path to a .ld file. It turns out to be another "illegal character" problem. The offending character was the (wait for it): =

Heuristic of the week: use only [a..z] in your paths, as there are bound to be other illegal characters </vomit>.

The GNU make manual doesn't explicitly document this.