Escaping in makefile

Make is quite lispy when you get down to it. Here's a non-awk version that does the same thing:

space := $() #

M_ARCH := $(firstword $(subst -,$(space),$(shell g++ -dumpmachine)))

all:
    $(info $(M_ARCH))

It's the dollar sign, in makefiles you'll have to type $$ to get a single dollar sign:

M_ARCH := $(shell g++ -dumpmachine | awk '{split($$1,a,"-");print a[1]}')