Re: makefile:8: *** missing separator. Stop.

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, 2009-10-05 at 11:47 -0700, address@hidden wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> First, not being a stranger to lists, I realize this has been covered  
> here googleplex times.
> 
> I'm trying to run make on some source I dl'd.
> 
> I take it the problem lies in my mkfile.c which is pretty long.
> 
> I also found this error is probably due to spaces used in place of tabs?
> 
> Is it a matter of replacing spaces with tabs in this file?
> 
> And which spaces do I replace as I;m sure I shouldn't replace all of  
> them.

I don't know what "mkfile.c" is but it sure doesn't sound like a
makefile to me.

The error message you're seeing:

        makefile:8: *** missing separator.  Stop.

tells you the problem is in the file "makefile", line 8.

So, I would look there and replace those spaces with TABs.

Really, you will end up doing this a LOT if your file is corrupted.  It
will almost certainly be faster to try to figure out why/how the file
got corrupted and fix that, rather than fixing the file up after the
fact.

If you really don't want to do that then in general it should be safe
(unless your makefile is REALLY badly written) to replace the first 8
spaces on any line with a TAB.