FIX: NMAKE Fails If Paths & File Names Have Special Characters

• The Microsoft Program Maintenance Utility (Nmake.exe)
  • Microsoft Visual C++, 32-bit Editions, versions 4.0, 4.1, 4.2

SYMPTOMS

If a character with a special meaning to NMAKE is used in a file name or path in a project created within the development environment, then an NMAKE error will be generated if you attempt to build the project from the command line with Nmake.exe. For example, if a file name is Tes$ting.cpp, the error is:

U1073: don't know how to make '".\Tesing.cpp"'

U1038: internal error : lexer

U1017: unknown directive '!ting.obj" :

CAUSE

Certain characters have special meaning to NMAKE. For example, the dollar sign ($) indicates the beginning of a MACRO, the pound sign (#) is the start of a comment, and the exclamation point (!) indicates the start of a preprocessing directive. For further information on special NMAKE characters see the NMAKE reference in the Visual C++ User's Guide.

Usually, placing a caret (^) in front of a special character will force that character to be treated as a literal character. However, these make files use inline response files, and if file names with special characters are used in an inline response file, placing a caret in front of the character will not resolve the error. For more information on this problem, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q59409 Trouble with File Names w/ a Dollar Sign ($) in Inline Files

RESOLUTION

Build the project from within the development environment.

-or-

Rename the files or paths so they don't use any special characters.

-or-

If the special characters are dollar signs, make a backup copy of the makefile and place a dollar sign in front of the dollar signs in the file names to force them to be treated as a literal character.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a bug in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article. This bug was corrected in Visual C++ version 5.0.

MORE INFORMATION

The project will build without errors from within the development environment because it does not use Nmake.exe to build the project. It uses an internal build engine that can handle the different file names.

Additional query words: kbVC400bug 10.20 utilities

Keywords : kbVC500fix NmakeIss
Version : 4.0 4.1 4.2
Platform : NT WINDOWS
Issue type : kbbug