Re: sh.exe running twice per job

[Paul D. Smith]

%% "J. Grant" <address@hidden> writes:

  jg> on the 27/03/04 18:16, Earnie Boyd wrote:
  >> J. Grant wrote:

  >>> Why does sh.exe need to run twice?

  >> Because that is the way bash works?  sh.exe -c foo.sh starts sh as
  >> a parent process and the child sh executes the script.

  jg> Do you know how the first sh.exe passes script to the child
  jg> process in that case out of interest?

I didn't understand your question :-(

A command like this:

    sh -c 'foo.sh'

will invoke two shells: the first one that gets a command line to run
and the command line is "foo.sh".  Then foo.sh is invoked, which is
itself a shell script and presumably begins with:

    #!/bin/sh

and so another shell is invoked to run the shell script.

This is how the shell works; it's not related to make at all.

  jg> (The child sh.exe does not have any arguments.)  Seems a little
  jg> excessive, but I doubt any extra overhead of this extra
  jg> intermediary process is noticeable in general use.  It appears to
  jg> me like the parent sh.exe just uses the child sh.exe to launch the
  jg> final process.  Not sure why it does not just launch it directly
  jg> though.

GNU make _will_ launch it directly unless it determines that the command
line needs a shell to interpret.  For example, if the command to be run
contains redirection, or it runs multiple commands, or whatever.

In UNIX at least, a command like the one above won't run "sh -c
'foo.sh'"; it will just run foo.sh directly.

-- 
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