I want to add

-DGIT_COMMIT_INFO="`git log -1 --format='"%ad %h"' --date=format:'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'`"

to the Makefile generated by CMake.

I tried some of the answers to this questions, but for some reason none seemed to work. So I thought I would go for a more basic approach and tried to use add_compile_definitions. However, regardless of how I use it, backslashes and extra quotation marks get added in the string written in CMakeFiles/my_project.dir/flags.make.

When I write add_compile_definitions(GIT_COMMIT_INFO="`git log -1 --format='"%ad %h"' --date=format:'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'`") or add_compile_definitions(GIT_COMMIT_INFO="`git log -1 --format='"%ad %h"' --date=format:'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'`"), I get -DGIT_COMMIT_INFO=""`git log -1 --format='"%ad %h"' --date=format:'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'`"".

I tried various ways to escape the special characters, but then I get outputs that are even further from what I want.

How can I tell CMake to not escape the backticks and not add extra double quotes?