Re: mingw make problem

[William A. Hoffman]

At 05:38 PM 8/17/2006, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 12:21:41AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>> Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 17:02:30 -0400
>>> From: Bill Hoffman
>>> 
>>> At 04:48 PM 8/17/2006, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>> 
>>> >I don't understand why MinGW's make should be using anything like /bin/sh.
>>> >Shouldn't it be using cmd.exe or command.com?
>>> >
>>> It seems that if it finds sh.exe in the path it uses it.
>>
>>Yes.  This is by design (not mine, long before I started using the
>>Windows port, let alone contributing to it).  I'm guessing that the
>>reason was twofold: (1) relative stupidity of Windows shells of yore,
>>and (2) lots of Makefile's out there which depend on a Unixy shell,
>>but don't say "SHELL = /bin/sh" explicitly.
>>
>>Make 3.81 adds a feature whereby you can say "SHELL = cmd.exe" and
>>have it use CMD even if sh.exe is on your PATH.  Previous versions of
>>Make didn't allow even that.
>
>This behavior was controlled under the old Cygwin make via a --win32
>option (an option that RMS repeatedly asked me to change, FWIW).
>
>So, it sounds like one solution to the problem might be to just use
>SHELL=cmd.exe.

But I want it to use sh.exe.   The makefiles are mostly POSIX,
the only non-POSIX thing in them is the driver letter stuff.
C:/foo/bar.C.   So cmd.exe does not like paths like that.   Also,
cmd.exe has problems with long command lines.   MSYS make would
be a good choice, but it has the bad habit of changing command line
options of dos programs into full paths to the msys mount point.


-Bill