GNU Make: shell cat file yields contents without newlines

Question

Makefile:

.PHONY: all
SHELL:=/usr/bin/env bash
all:
    $(eval x=$(shell cat file))
    @echo "$x"

File:

foo 
bar

Output:

foo bar

---

How do I get the contents of the file into the make variable without losing the newlines?

Answer 1

You can't do this with shell, as described in its documentation.

If you have a sufficiently new version of GNU make, you can use the file function however.