Multi-line bash commands in makefile

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You can use backslash for line continuation. However note that the shell receives the whole command concatenated into a single line, so you also need to terminate some of the lines with a semicolon:

foo:
    for i in `find`;     \
    do                   \
        all="$$all $$i"; \
    done;                \
    gcc $$all

But if you just want to take the whole list returned by the find invocation and pass it to gcc, you actually don’t necessarily need a multiline command:

foo:
    gcc `find`

Or, using a more shell-conventional $(command) approach (notice the $ escaping though):

foo:
    gcc $$(find)

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