Shell commands in makefile not working (running Windows XP)

[Scott Merz]

Hello everyone

 

This is my first post here, so if this issue has already been addressed, I am apologizing ahead of time.

 

I was tasked to get all of our console C code to compile under Microsoft Visual Studio. The code is compiled using a GCC cross compiler, so I created a console makefile that will handle it all from the command line. The next task was interfacing visual studio with it. This was actually fairly straightforward, and I created a wrapper visual C++ makefile project with custom build commands. I overrode each command with calls to a batch file (NMAKE-BuildUtilityScript.bat) that would, in turn, invoke a Jscript file to extract the list of source files from the Visual Studio XML based project file (.vcproj), and write them into a text file. Now this is where the problems arise…

 

The console makefile simply has to parse the text file of line delimited source file names into a variable, so it knows what files to “build”. This should be VERY straightforward using the shell command…

 

srcFiles = $(shell type srcFiles.txt)

 

that command should populate srcFiles with a series of space delimited filenames (since the description of shell in GNU make says that when using shell, all carriage returns and end of line characters are converted to spaces). However, subsequent echo calls show that srcFiles remains EMPTY, thus the shell call is not working. Another thing, even though there is no SHELL environment variable, ‘make’ sets it to sh.exe. Even if I call make with the “-e” argument (which ignores environmental variables) and override SHELL=%SystemRoot%\system32\cmd.exe, echoing $(SHELL) still brings up sh.exe. This is very confusing, and I have tried everything I can think of, and am stuck at the following avenues to place blame:

 

1. SHELL=sh.exe
2. Windows XP Command Shell
3. MS-DOS in General

 

I am wondering if when Microsoft implemented their newer XP command shell if it doesn’t support the shell function. Some pertinent information:

 

Running GNU Make version 3.77

Running GCC version 2.95.2

Running Windows XP version 2002 Service Pack 1

 

Thanks to any who help.

 

-Scott Merz

 

Scott Merz

Software Intern

The InsituGroup

www.insitugroup.net