Question

I am trying to have my Makefile echo text without the trailing new line, but am unable to. I am experiencing the behavior on OS X (on Linux everything works as expected).

Makefile

a:
    @echo -n "hello"

b:
    @echo -n hello

c:
    @/bin/echo -n "hello"

Output:

$make a
-n hello
$make b
hello$make c
hello$

In other words, the make a is broken. What exactly is happening? Is make using a built-in echo? Clearly the presence of the double quotes changes the behavior, but why?

Update

As discovered by @chepner, using the full path to /bin/echo in the makefile understands the -n flag correctly.

Answer 1

Something about the quotes confuses make. Your code behaves the same for me, but the following works as expected:

help:
        @echo -n Shouldn\'t print a newline

Hardcoding the path to the executable also works:

help:
        @/bin/echo -n "Shouldn't print a newline"

The Mac OS X man page for echo, while discussing the existence of shell built-in echos, mentions that the echo of sh(1) does not support the -n option, but that fails to explain (to me, anyway) why my first alternative works.

---

Confirmation that make is using sh to execute the commands by default. Make manual 5.3.2 Choosing the Shell specifies this hehavrior:

The program used as the shell is taken from the variable SHELL. If
this variable is not set in your makefile, the program /bin/sh is used
as the shell. The argument(s) passed to the shell are taken from the
variable .SHELLFLAGS. The default value of .SHELLFLAGS is -c normally,
or -ec in POSIX-conforming mode.

In

SHELL = bash
help:
        @echo -n "Shouldn't print a newline"
        @echo -n Shouldn\'t print a newline

both echo statements behave the same (no newlines printed). So without that variable, we have bash pretending to be sh, but evaluating the two lines differently. Question 1: why? Question 2: is the second line the native bash echo or /bin/echo, rather than the emulated sh echo?