Question

I have this in my makefile

test:
   cat t.txt | sort -t $$'\t' -k 2,2

But “make test” gives me this error

cat t.txt | sort -t $’\t’ -k 2,2
sort: multi-character tab `$\t’
make: * [test] Error 2

Works fine on Redhat linux but fails on Ubuntu linux

Answer 1

The $'\t' syntax you’re trying to use is a bash-ism, but by default gmake uses /bin/sh as the shell. You can either override the SHELL variable in your makefile, as in:

SHELL=/bin/bash

or explicitly invoke bash for this specific command:

test:
   bash -c "cat t.txt | sort -t $$'\t' -k 2,2"