apparent regression involving PATH resolution

[frederik]

Dear GNU Make,

A recent change broke use of Perl in Makefiles for me. This is because I have a 
PATH element with a directory called 'perl'. Here is how to reproduce it:

    $ sudo pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/make-4.2.1-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
    ...
    $ mkdir -p mybin/perl
    $ cat Makefile
    PATH=mybin:/usr/bin/

    all:
            which perl
            perl -le 'print "HELLO"'
    $ make
    which perl
    /usr/bin/perl
    perl -le 'print "HELLO"'
    HELLO
    $ sudo pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/make-4.3-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
    ...
    $ make
    which perl
    /usr/bin/perl
    perl -le 'print "HELLO"'
    make: perl: Permission denied
    make: *** [Makefile:5: all] Error 127

As you can see, the problem occurs with Make 4.3.1 but not 4.2.1.

Thank you,

Frederick