Re: Some useful primitives: escape (and quoting variables), lastwords (for recursivity)… and files with spaces in them?

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, 2018-05-21 at 08:12 +0200, Garreau, Alexandre wrote:
> Also I was wondering… would there be some possible mechanism so that
> a filename with spaces in it might be appropriatedly treated by
> implicit rules? or is it intrinsic to, say, automatic variables
> splitting with spaces?

This is a long-standing request.  It's not simple by any stretch.  Huge
amounts of code inside make itself, not to mention almost every
makefile in existence, make assumptions about whitespace being word
separators.  There was a long discussion here a few years ago about a
new capability for handling special characters in filenames possible,
and I have a partial implementation that was not completed, of a
possible way to do this.

Until something drastic changes in GNU make it's simply not feasible to
work with whitespace-containing pathnames.  It's best to simply avoid
them, rather than spending huge amounts of effort to try to make them
work.