Makefiles and script files

[sharonenoch]

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Hi

I would like to put out something which i came across today. i dont know why it is happening like that

Suppose

path=hello

In makefiles suppose we want to print the varibale path.
It should be done in the following manner

echo $(path)

The above will print the string hello

if given as

echo $path

then it will print an empty string


It is vice versa in script files

what change does the brackets make in makefiles and script files?

or is it like take it for granted the way it is

[lakerdonald]

Parentheses are used in Makefiles to reference variable names ( the exception are one-character names like 1, d, or a, which are $1, $d, and $a ).
This is just the way things are.

[sharonenoch]

thanks laker

actually i was sitting with this issue by giving wihout the brackets in the makefile and wondering why it was not coming the string that was assigned to it

anyway now i can keep that in mind whenever I do something like this

[scm]

In shellscripts you use braces { } to enclose shell variables, handy if you want to append characters to variable values, eg

string=myfile
echo ${string}a  ${string}b

Without the braces the shell would look for variables "stringa" and "stringb" and (probably) return nulls, when what you want is "myfilea" and "myfileb".