Variable Name Error “is undefined” even though “variables.less” imported

Question

I started using LESS today. But it\'s kinda weird. This code does not work. I get an error:

! Variable Name Error: @linkColor in a is undefined.

Answer 1

There may be another possible root cause.

Here is my original Gruntfile.js:

less: {
      compile: {
        files: {
          'css/less.css': 'less/**/*.less'
        }
      }
    },

The wildcard makes LESS compiler compile all .less files under that folder and merge all results into one CSS. And I got errors running grunt less:compile:

NameError: .transition is undefined in less/core/html.less on line 38, column 3

Once I changed 'less/**/*.less' into 'less/css.less', the compilation succeeds.