Escaping colons in filenames in a Makefile

Question

Is there a way to get GNU make to work correctly with filenames that contain colons?

The specific problem I\'m running into happens to involve a pattern rule. Here\

Answer 1

I am not positivie this should work, but the reason it says "missing destination file" is simple:

%.bar: ; cp $< $@

That line says to copy the target from the first dependency. your a:b.bar does not have any dependency, so the cp fails. what did you want it to copy ? a:b.foo ? in that case, you would need:

%.bar: %.foo ; cp $< $@