Why makefile doesn't accept plain spaces instead of tabulation
 

Hello,

I use make since many years now and it's a great tool for sure, but I can't understand why there's still a need for tabulation instead of simple spaces for command lines! If anybody know the reason I'll be happy if it can share it!

Cheers.

It's a way of delimiting commands versus other statements in a makefile. Commands in a makefile start with a tab, so

Says that in order to make the foobar (name, before the : ), foobar.o is used (spaces are used to delimit objects, since multiple objects can be used for one program). The next line that starts with a tab is the command that's run to produce the object(s), (gcc -c foobar.c).