The last change added .PRECIOUS: $(BIN) to everyway Makefile in hopes the libapps.a will not be deleted on Control-C (unproven so far).  However, $(BIN) may contain back slashes in some build platforms and that causes problems for make:  It can't handle the backslashes in the .PRECIOUS dependency list.  $(BIN) replaced with ../../libapp.a, where the number of ../ depends on the depth of the Makefile in the apps/ source tree.