As per [1], quote: It’s very important that you recognize the limited scope in which automatic variable values are available: they only have values within the recipe. In particular, you cannot use them anywhere within the target list of a rule; they have no value there and will expand to the empty string. Also, they cannot be accessed directly within the prerequisite list of a rule. A common mistake is attempting to use $@ within the prerequisites list; this will not work. Based on the patch by S-P Chan <shihping.chan@gmail.com> [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Automatic-Variables.html closes #1754 Thanks: S-P Chan <shihping.chan@gmail.com> Change-Id: Ia5f9d7a75f04d9533afaace8ed49cc222e4307a8 Ref: https://github.com/sipwise/rtpengine/issues/1754pull/1802/head