You may need to specify as a literal character one of the characters that NMAKE uses for a special purpose. These characters are:
: ; # ( ) $ ^ \ { } ! @ —
To use one of these characters without its special meaning, place a caret (^) in front of it. NMAKE ignores carets that precede characters other than the special characters listed previously. A caret within a quoted string is treated as a literal caret character.
You can also use a caret at the end of a line to insert a literal newline character in a string or macro. The caret tells NMAKE to interpret the newline character as part of the macro, not a line break. Note that this effect differs from using a backslash (\) to continue a line in a macro definition. A newline character that follows a backslash is replaced with a space. For more information, see “User-Defined Macros”.
In a command, a percent symbol (%) can represent the beginning of a file specifier. (See “Filename-Parts Syntax” on page topic.) NMAKE interprets %s as a filename, and it interprets the character sequence of %| followed by d, e, f, p, or F as part or all of a filename or path. If you need to represent these characters literally in a command, specify a double percent sign (%%) in place of a single one. In all other situations, NMAKE interprets a single % literally. However, NMAKE always interprets a double %% as a single %. Therefore, to represent a literal %%, you can specify either three percent signs, %%%, or four percent signs, %%%%.
To use the dollar sign ($) as a literal character in a command, you must specify two dollar signs ($$); this method can also be used in other situations where ^$ also works.
For information on literal characters in macro definitions, see “Special Characters in Macros”.