escape sequences

[Brendan Heading]

Strictly not a Make question, this, but it's close. I'm trying to figure 
out a way I can automate a method whereby I can convert a recursive make 
situation into one single makefile, by parsing (a little bit) the 
existing Makefiles (this is a bit easier than replacing the whole thing).

I've got most of the details worked out, but one thing I'd like to do is 
pull in multi-line variables, you know :

FILES=one \
        two \
        three

Obviously if you "cat foo |grep FILES" you'll get "FILES=one \" in the 
output. I want something that understands the escape characters so that 
it reads in all the lines and treats it as one line (which is 
technically what it is).

Any pointers, or shall I just go away and write an awk script to do it ?

Thanks

Brendan