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Re: How does make determine which shells to invoke when executing external commands?


On 6/5/2013 09:32, Hua Ai wrote:

I have gone through FAQ and mailing lists but couldn't find an answer
to this.

The answer is in the GNU make docs, or in the O'Reilly book if you prefer.

Especially, this line:

    @mkdir -p $(dir $@)

It seems that, for the computers where it didn't work, the makefile
always invokes the mkdir from windows (Windows 7 64bit).

That means those computers have a native Windows version of GNU make on them, most likely the one from MinGW. MinGW GNU make is built to use cmd.exe to interpret shell commands, not /bin/sh as Cygwin's GNU make does by default.

The docs will further enlighten you about how the SHELL variable can override this default behavior. I suspect "SHELL=/bin/sh" still won't do the right thing, though, since MinGW GNU make doesn't understand POSIX paths. Something like SHELL=c:\cygwin\bin\sh.exe *might* work.

A superior solution is to get everyone to use Cygwin make.

If you can't do that, because you don't have any influence over the software installed on the other computers, you might have to switch to one of the portable Makefile builders, so you can ship both POSIX and MinGW makefiles. Bakefile (http://bakefile.org/) can do this for sure. CMake and Scons probably can, too.

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