Re: Problems with echo. (echo period)

[Greg Chicares]

On 2007-04-23 18:36Z, Keith Huntington wrote:
> 
> If it were JUST the special case of "Echo.", I would
> absolutely be on the side of making the tweak to Make
> to support the one special case... but now that I know
> that CMD.EXE just has an obnoxious parser with some
> undocumented rules,

Here's information paraphrased (unless in double quotes) from
my June, 1988 copy of the book "PC Magazine DOS Power Tools",
telling how to echo a blank line in batch files.

DOS 2.x: 'ECHO' followed immediately by any of these ASCII
characters (given as decimal):
  0-12, 14-25, 27-34, 43, 44, 47, 58, 69, 61, 91-3
"and then add an extra space. If you forget the extra space at
the end this technique won't work at all."

Later versions: 'ECHO' followed immediately by any of these:
  0-8, 11, 12, 14-25, 27-31, 34, 43, 46, 47, 58, 91, 93

Alternative for all versions: 'ECHO' followed immediately by a
space, followed immediately by one of these characters:
  0, 8, 9, 32, 255
except that 9 and 32 don't work with DOS 3.x .

I'm sure things have changed since 1988. I know I spent a lot
of time modifying makefiles that worked in ms windows 95 but
not in ms windows 2000, with the worst problems stemming from
redirection and from single versus double quotes.

> I feel that trying to emulate that
> weirdness in Make would be an endless chase.  Best to
> just leave it alone, IMO.

I agree.