How to escape a backslash in the end to mean literal backslash in Makefile?

Question

Here is my Makefile:

SLASH = \

all:
    echo '$(SLASH)'

This is the output:

$ make all
echo ''

$

The \ in the end means line continuation in Makefile, so it ends up assigning an empty string into SLASH.

How can I assign a literal backslash into SLASH?

Answer 1

You can probably use a dummy `blank' to fool make...

BLANK :=
SLASH = \$(BLANK)

all:
    echo '$(SLASH)'

The above gives me...

G.M> make -f how-to-escape-a-backslash-in-the-end-to-mean-literal-backslash-in-makefile.mk
echo '\'
\
G.M>