"missing separator" in makefile

Question

I don't know a lot about makefiles but get their general purpose. I've installed all of the dependencies for a project and I'm simply trying to run make on an old makefile, however I get the following error:

"makefile:3: *** missing separator. Stop"

As I understand it this means that it's looking for a tab/etc., however this is all that is on lines 1-3:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

I already had to convert this file from all-spaces to tabs, however I wouldn't think a tab or other separator would be required here. This is from an old project so I'm sure this won't be the first problem I run into but I can't find a formatting tool or anything else online to help.

(edit: if I do put a tab there it turns into an entirely different error so I feel like this is an encoding issue or something?)

Any advice is appreciated!

Answer 1

This is not a normal Makefile, it is a perl script. The make command won't work with it.

To execute the script you either need to run

perl makefile

or give it the execute permission and run it that way with

chmod +x makefile 
./makefile