GNU make yields “commands commence before first target” error

Question

In my makefile, I would like to check for the existence of a library and give an informative error message. I created a conditional that should exit the make process when th

Answer 1

First of all, you are looking at the contents of a variable that is named after the current path, which is probably not what you want. A simple environment variable reference is $(name) or ${name}, not $(${name}). Due to this, line 13 is always evaluated.

Second, I think it is choking on the indentation of the $(error ...) expression. While the expression resolves to an empty string, there is still a tab character at the start of the line, which indicates a command, which in turn cannot exist outside a rule.

I think using spaces rather than tabs to indent would work.