I am relatively new to using Make. I am trying to port a shell script that has a variable that is accessed using ${var:9:-1}, however in Make as $ is reserved I cannot use this convention. I am lost as whenever I try to search for answers they are extremely verbose.
eg:
foo:
bar=`abc|xyz`
baz -n ${bar:9:-1}
I know this is old, but since this comes up in a search for makefile substring function, I'm going to put user313992's and schily's comments into an answer.
SHELL := /bin/bash
foo:
bar=$$(abc|xyz) && baz -n $${bar:9:-1}
You can, of course, continue to use backticks for the first part if you prefer.
For a substring in the definitions section (my use case), it could be structured as:
SHELL := /bin/bash
bar ?= $(shell $$(xyz | abc))
barsoom := $(shell bar="$(bar)" && echo $${bar:9:-1})
foo:
baz -n $(barsoom)
The bar=$(bar) is unfortunately necessary as, even when using export, previous definitions are unavailable to the shell except in recipes.
$.baz -n $${bar:9:-1}. But each line is executed in a different shell, so you should put them on the same line:bar=`abc|xyz`; baz -n $${bar:9:-1}, otherwise thebarvariable will be empty.${bar:9:-1}because this uses aksh/bashextension.