Re: mingw make problems

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 17:02:30 -0400
> From: Bill Hoffman <address@hidden>
> 
> 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.