Several control characters are used by NMAKE32 in its syntax. These characters are:

(          )     #     $     ^     \
{          }     !     @     -     [newline]

To use one of these characters in a command and not have it interpreted by NMAKE32, a caret (^) is used in front of the character.

Examples:

The string:

     BIG^#.C

is treated as

     BIG#.C

With the caret, you can include a literal newline character in a description file. This capability is useful in macro definitions, as in the following example:

     XYZ=abc^<enter>
     def

where <enter> is a newline character.

The effect is equivalent to the effect of assigning the C-style string abc\ndef to the XYZ macro. Note that this effect differs from the effect of using the backslash (\) to continue a line. A newline character that follows a backslash is replaced with a space, unless the -\ option is specified. NMAKE32 ignores a caret that is not followed by any of the characters it sees in its syntax.

Note: Control characters in the makefile that are used in filenames, pathnames, and so on, that are not to be evaluated by NMAKE32 must be preceded by the caret (^) character. For example, to define a macro which contains the root directory specifier C:\, the backslash character must be preceded by a caret character, since the backslash character is used to concatenate lines in NMAKE32. The proper way to define this macro is:

  root=C:^\

If the macro was coded without the caret character, such as in:

  root=C:\
  !ifdef root
      .
      .
      .

an error would result, since NMAKE32 would concatenate the root macro definition with the next line in the makefile. Placing a caret character before the backslash character prevents NMAKE32 from processing the backslash as a control character.