How to resolve warning 'excess arguments to builtin `define' ignored' with m4

Question

I'm using m4 define to create a macro. I tried using include(file) to read the content of the file as below.

 define(`TEST', include(file1))
 TEST

file1:

test -abc -LDFLAGS "-Wl,-rpath,/home/user -lmsg"

When I run the code, it gives a warning and doesn't print anything beyond -Wl

    m4:r1:1: Warning: excess arguments to builtin `define' ignored

    test -abc -LDFLAGS "-Wl 

I tried using single quotes, but it didn't work. Can someone please help me resolve this?

Answer 1

If there are commas in the file, those will be interpreted as argument separators. The include replacement is inserted before determining the arguments to define.

Using single quotes is correct -- then the include will be processed in the output instead. For example:

define(`TEST', `include(file1)')
TEST

does work on my machine. (note that an even better solution is to add quotes around file1 as well).