You see, this is why I hate Make. Did you know that a backslash at the end of a comment line extends the comment to the next line? For example:
# This is a comment \ and this is still a comment
This is all very nice and logical—a trailing backslash means the same thing no matter where it appears in a file—but it has all the niceness and logic just exactly backwards. The behavior of (line-based) comments in every other programming environment I know of is: a comment character (in this case ‘#‘) introduces a comment that is terminated by the end of the line; if a line is not preceded by a comment character, it is not a comment.
This may seem harmless. But consider the following:
FILES = \
file1 \
file2 \
file3
Now suppose we decide to temporarily remove file1:
FILES= \
# file1 \
file2 \
file3
Does FILES equal "file2 file3"? No! FILES is empty. And that’s if you’re lucky and you didn’t get some weird syntax error.
Procrastiblog 