NMAKE uses the following punctuation characters in its syntax:

ÚÄÄÄÄÄÄÂÄÄÄÄÄÄÂÄÄÄÄÄÄÂÄÄÄÄÄÄÂÄÄÄÄÄÄÂÄÄÄÄÄÄ¿
³(     ³)     ³#     ³$     ³^     ³\     ³
ÃÄÄÄÄÄÄÅÄÄÄÄÄÄÅÄÄÄÄÄÄÅÄÄÄÄÄÄÅÄÄÄÄÄÄÅÄÄÄÄÄÄ´
³{     ³}     ³!     ³@     ³-     ³      ³
ÀÄÄÄÄÄÄÁÄÄÄÄÄÄÁÄÄÄÄÄÄÁÄÄÄÄÄÄÁÄÄÄÄÄÄÁÄÄÄÄÄÄÙ

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

For example,

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

The effect is equivalent to 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.

NMAKE ignores a caret that is not followed by any of the characters it uses in its syntax. A caret that appears within quotation marks is not treated as an escape character.

Note: The escape character cannot be used in the command portion of a dependency block.

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