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 could not get the answer posted by @navjotk to work, so I am just gonna cheat and do this;

FILENAME:=foo:bar
foo_bar:
    touch $(FILENAME)

run:
    if [ ! -e "$(FILENAME)" ]; then $(MAKE) foo_bar; fi

output:

$ make run
if [ ! -e "foo:bar" ]; then /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/make foo_bar; fi
touch foo:bar

$ ls
Makefile foo:bar

Close enough for me.