Naming rules

It's recommended that you name your goals using alphanumeric chars + underscore.

However, it's possible to name a goal any way you want provided that you apply proper escaping:

@goal 'name with spaces' # all chars between '' have literal meaning, same as in shell, ' itself is not allowed in it

@goal $'name that contains \' single quote' # if you need to have ' in a string, use dollar-strings and escape it

@goal usual_name  

Now ./makesure -l gives:

Available goals:
  'name with spaces'
  $'name that contains \' single quote'
  usual_name

Note, how goal names are already escaped in output. This is to make it easier for you to call it directly:

./makesure $'name that contains \' single quote'

Same naming rules apply to other directives (like @doc).

Usually you won't need this escaping tricks often, but they can be especially in use for @glob goals if the relevant files have spaces in them:

@goal @glob 'file\ with\ spaces*.txt'
@goal other
  @depends_on 'file with spaces1.txt'

More info on this topic is covered in the issue.