RE: Crash with recursive make

[John Hall]

On 07 October 2006 10:21, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

> > Investigating further, make is crashing in windows32_openpipe while
> > evaluating the expression:
> > 
> >     VERSION_STRING = $(shell cat $(VERSION_TXT))
> > 
> > where cat is a Windows native version of cat from unxutils
> > (http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/).
> 
> And what is $(VERSION_TXT)?  Can you show the contents of that file
> here?  Also, what is the shell used by Make on your system?
> 
> FWIW, I cannot reproduce this with the following minimal Makefile:
> 
> VERSION_TXT = version.txt
> VERSION_STRING = $(shell cat $(VERSION_TXT))
> 
> all:
>       echo $(VERSION_STRING)
> 
> However, my cat.exe is from GnuWin32 site, not from unxutils.  I'm not
> sure if this matters.  I tried the above Makefile both with a native
> Windows port of zsh and with SHELL=cmd.exe, which causes Make 3.81 to
> invoke CMD.  Make didn't crash in either case.

Eli,

I can reproduce it with version.txt just containing the word 'hello'
(with \r\n line terminator). What does make use the specified shell for?
I traced through the code and whatever I set SHELL to, CreateProcess in
process_begin is launching cat directly - it doesn't seem to use a
shell.

I can send you my version of cat if you want.

Regards,
John