Errors in make file : *** missing separator. Stop

Question

I am facing errors in make file in CentOS 6.02 64 bit. I need to know what should be done to make the makefile workable. Any suggestion will be greatly helpful. My make file

Answer 1

Open your make file in vim rather than in editors like gedit. Every line in a recipe must begin with a tab character.

Answer 2

This answer is for other Make newbies such as myself who find this question from Googling and get stuck because they are modifying a large pre-existing Makefile, with no lines beginning with a space character. My problem occurred because a makefile in a subdirectory with spaces instead of tabs was getting called by a parent makefile, where I erroneously thought the problem existed.

Once I fixed the makefile in the subdirectory, everything worked like a charm.

Answer 3

You can find an explanation of this error in Appendix B Errors Generated by Make.

Every line in a recipe must begin with a tab character. The recipes starting with $(C++) and $(CC) near the top of your file do not seem to start with a tab character.

Additionally, the section

INCLUDE = \
    -I./usr/include/sys
    -I./Headers \

seems to be missing a backslash after sys and that same section (and many more) have superfluous empty lines.