Hi,

Last night I found a very cruel bug in GNU make that led to a costly
experience for me. Hence, I decided to report it and to help others not to
repeat my experiment.

In a Makefile, and in assignment operations, the space character after the
value is included to the value by `make'. Therefore, if I have an assignment
like this:

   VAR=value

where, there is a space character after the `value', then the GNU make would
translate a command like this:

   rm -rf /mydir/${VAR}/*

into:

   rm -rf /mydir/value /*

that is equal to:

   rm -rf /mydir/value && rm -rf /*

This problem is so cruel because you can not see the space character after
the `value' and it will lead to hard damages to your root partition, in case
if you are a super user. So I would be grateful if you consider that in your
next releases and inform me as well.

Thanks,
Hamed Janzadeh
Computer Engineering Department,
University of Texas, Dallas
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