Knowledge Base

PRB: Special Characters in Path Cause NMake Error U1007

Article ID: 121018

Article Last Modified on 12/1/2003


APPLIES TO


This article was previously published under Q121018

SYMPTOMS

Building a project that uses one of the special characters shown below works correctly in the Visual Workbench. But an attempt to build the same project from a command session fails, returning this error:
test.mak(98) : fatal error U1007: double quotation mark not allowed in name
Stop.

CAUSE

This is limitation of the NMAKE utility included with the products listed above. The following legitimate characters cause this problem:
   $, %, @, #, !, ^, (, ), {, }, [, ], -, and the space character.
				
When one of them is used in a path specification, Visual C++ puts quotation marks around the file specification in several places within the makefile. NMAKE cannot process files specified in this way.

WORKAROUND

To work around this problem:

  • Avoid using any of these special characters. -or-

  • Modify the makefile to remove the quotation marks and use the project as an external makefile when using the Visual C++ Workbench to launch the build. -or-

  • Always use the Visual C++ Workbench to build the project.

Additional query words: quotes

Keywords: kbide kbprb KB121018