Makefile `echo -n' not working

Question

I am trying to have my Makefile echo text without the trailing new line, but am unable to. I am experiencing the behavior on OS X (on Linux everything works as expected).

Answer 1

Something about the quotes confuses make. Your code behaves the same for me, but the following works as expected:

help:
        @echo -n Shouldn\'t print a newline

Hardcoding the path to the executable also works:

help:
        @/bin/echo -n "Shouldn't print a newline"

The Mac OS X man page for echo, while discussing the existence of shell built-in echos, mentions that the echo of sh(1) does not support the -n option, but that fails to explain (to me, anyway) why my first alternative works.

---

Confirmation that make is using sh to execute the commands by default. In

SHELL = bash
help:
        @echo -n "Shouldn't print a newline"
        @echo -n Shouldn\'t print a newline

both echo statements behave the same (no newlines printed). So without that variable, we have bash pretending to be sh, but evaluating the two lines differently. Question 1: why? Question 2: is the second line the native bash echo or /bin/echo, rather than the emulated sh echo?