Makefile:77: *** missing separator. Stop

Question

Hi I am trying to install systemC on WSL2, when I run sudo make I seem to be getting this error

Making all in src
make[1]: Entering directory '/home/ryans/systemc-2.3.4/src'
Makefile:77: *** missing separator.  Stop.
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/ryans/systemc-2.3.4/src'
make: *** [Makefile:557: all-recursive] Error 1

I have looked at answers, solution 1 and solution2 but they don't seem to apply to my case because the file in question do not have a space or a tab at line 77.

Answer 1

Seems like the right way to install systemC on WSL is the run the following commands in the uncompressed .tar folder,

sudo aclocal
sudo automake --add-missing
sudo autoupdate

before making the objdir with the other instructions can be followed here.

Answer 2

Just cannot avoid answering this. You correctly quote other answers, so try this little exercise:

mkdir exercise
cd exercise
echo good > Makefile
make

As you'll probably see, the error will be exactly like yours. That is, a nearly-empty makefile can cause this error. Most of the time, as provided in the quoted answers, the error is tricky to find because there is a tab missing, or replaced by blanks. But in many other cases, the message appears where something else in the makefile is missing.

In the exercise above, make expects "good" to be a target, so it expects a ":" separator and complains about its absence.