"multiple target patterns" Makefile error

Question

My makefile fails with error:

Makefile:34: *** multiple target patterns.  Stop.

What does it really mean, how can I fix this?

(GNU make manual, written by Captain Obvious, isn't helping).

Found it. I had rule in form:

$(FOO): bar

where FOO was set from shell command that polluted it with error message that contained a colon.

does http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21119863 or http://sourceware.org/ml/crossgcc/2009-07/msg00006.html help? — Alok Singhal, Jan 20 '10 at 10:05
A swift google reveals http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.utils.help/browse_frm/thread/d7eeff06e2b8394/1c932a7ea7664ade?lnk=st&q=%22multiple+target+patterns%22&rnum=7#1c932a7ea7664ade — , Jan 20 '10 at 10:08
These answers are just paraphrases of "you've got multiple target patterns". Well, I think I don't. How can I check it? What can trigger it? What precautions are needed to prevent this problem? — Kornel, Jan 22 '10 at 22:39
Everything was working one minute and then my script sneezed out a (semi)colon... heheh. Sweated it out trying to find the problem for at least 3 hours before I found your and @mcr 's answer. You just saved me a bucketful of sweat!! — GuruM, Jan 06 '12 at 04:46
The true root cause of this problem is GNU Make being a horrible piece of dung that should have died decades ago. — antred, Apr 09 '18 at 13:56

score 74 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 28 '13 at 19:41

74

I had it on the Makefile

MAPS+=reverse/db.901:550:2001.ip6.arpa 
lastserial:  ${MAPS}
    ./updateser ${MAPS}

It's because of the : in the file name. I solved this with

                      -------- notice
                     /    /
                    v    v
MAPS+=reverse/db.901\:550\:2001.ip6.arpa
lastserial:  ${MAPS}
    ./updateser ${MAPS}

edited Dec 28 '13 at 19:41

Zombo

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answered Sep 14 '10 at 17:32

mcr

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i have the same problem, but i don't understand your answer, will you elaborate this further for me, – Pir Fahim Shah Jan 11 '13 at 20:08
4

@PirFahimShah The answer is stating that the colons in the filename (db.901:550:2001.ip6.arpa) need to be escaped. mcr is escaping the colons by putting a backslash before them. That way, make does not interpret the colons as a special symbol. – Loduwijk Aug 18 '16 at 14:04
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Thanks, it worked for me. I had some old windows path with colon in it (`C:/Qt/5.8/mingw53_32/bin/rcc.exe`) in one of Makefile rules. Remove those autogenerated makefiles if you are building on Linux machine – Vadim Kotov Jul 14 '17 at 14:18
windows make switched to wsl (ubuntu) and got this error, `make clean` followed by `make` solved it. The erroneous line was `_build/nrf52840_xxaa/app_mpu.c.o: ../../../app_mpu.c \ ` – Tyeth Dec 15 '20 at 18:59

score 35 · Answer 2 · edited Aug 15 '13 at 19:37

35

Besides having to escape colons as in the original answer, I have found if the indentation is off you could potentially get the same problem. In one makefile, I had to replace spaces with a tab and that allowed me to get past the error.

edited Aug 15 '13 at 19:37

davenpcj

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answered Feb 15 '13 at 17:51

demongolem

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GNU make may also report "No Rule for Target" in this case. – davenpcj Aug 15 '13 at 19:38

score 4 · Answer 3 · edited Dec 28 '13 at 19:39

I just want to add, if you get this error because you are using Cygwin make and auto-generated files, you can fix it with the following sed,

sed -e 's@\\\([^ ]\)@/\1@g' -e 's@[cC]:@/cygdrive/c@' -i filename.d

You may need to add more characters than just space to the escape list in the first substitution but you get the idea. The concept here is that /cygdrive/c is an alias for c: that cygwin's make will recognize.

And may as well throw in

-e 's@^ \+@\t@'

just in case you did start with spaces on accident (although I /think/ this will usually be a "missing separator" error).

score 4 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 31 '15 at 06:04

I met with the same error. After struggling, I found that it was due to "Space" in the folder name.

For example :

Earlier My folder name was : "Qt Projects"

Later I changed it to : "QtProjects"

and my issue was resolved.

Its very simple but sometimes a major issue.

score 3 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 07 '20 at 13:47

3

My IDE left a mix of spaces and tabs in my Makefile.

Setting my Makefile to use only tabs fixed this error for me.

answered Sep 07 '20 at 13:47

Paul Wenzel

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score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Jan 04 '22 at 11:23

I got the same error and my issue was an extra whitespace and a backslash at the end of listing source files:

SRCS := ft_striteri.c \
        ft_putchar_fd.c \
        ft_putstr_fd.c \
        ft_putendl_fd.c \
        ft_putnbr_fd.c \
BONUS_SRCS :=   ft_lstadd_back.c \
                ft_lstadd_front.c \
                ft_lstlast.c \
                ft_lstnew.c \
                ft_lstsize.c

The correct version that works looks like this:

SRCS := ft_striteri.c \
        ft_putchar_fd.c \
        ft_putstr_fd.c \
        ft_putendl_fd.c \
        ft_putnbr_fd.c
BONUS_SRCS :=   ft_lstadd_back.c \
                ft_lstadd_front.c \
                ft_lstlast.c \
                ft_lstnew.c \
                ft_lstsize.c

I dont think the whitespace was the issue here. With the errant \ you were actually including `BONUS_SRCS :=` in SRCS. Not the definition, but the the literal text. Then, as others pointed out, you would receive this error because of the `:` in the rules using this "source file" — sherrellbc, Nov 25 '22 at 15:07

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Sep 17 '14 at 17:14

0

I had this problem (colons in the target name) because I had -n in my GREP_OPTIONS environment variable. Apparently, this caused configure to generate the Makefile incorrectly.

answered Sep 17 '14 at 17:14

Trebor Rude

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user103185 · Answer 8 · 2020-12-16T10:51:15.040

I also got this error (within the Eclipse-based STM32CubeIDE on Windows).

After double-clicking on the "multiple target patterns" error it showed a path to a .ld file. It turns out to be another "illegal character" problem. The offending character was the (wait for it): =

Heuristic of the week: use only [a..z] in your paths, as there are bound to be other illegal characters </vomit>.

The GNU make manual doesn't explicitly document this.

score 0 · Answer 9 · answered Mar 02 '23 at 14:44

I got this error and it was because I used explorer to copy/paste a directory into Windows Subsystem For Linux. Owner of all the files was root, but my WSL user was art. When I tried moving or modifying any files in the directory as user art I got permission denied.

I gave it a sudo chown -R <my user name> <path to my containing folder> to change the file owner to myself and it built after that.

"multiple target patterns" Makefile error

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