Re: Odd effects from setting SHELL?

[David Boyce]

At 12:05 PM 6/25/2007, Christian Convey wrote:
> So what puzzles me is that I was seeming to get a build error that was
> shell-specific.  Yet I see plenty of information from man pages, folks
> like you, etc. that say I should never be seeing shell-specific build
> errors.

You're asking people to remotely diagnose an anecdotal problem which 
you haven't even tried to reproduce, and I don't think that's fair. 
If you want to pursue this, put back the broken syntax and try to 
reproduce the problem with a csh user. Once you have a test case we 
(or I at least) will be happy to engage. If you're on Solaris, start 
diagnosis by prepending "truss -texec -f -a --" to the make command. 
If you're on Linux, strace will do a similar job. If you find a csh 
being exec-ed by make, we'll have some meat to chew on.

-David Boyce

PS This most likely is related to the fact that bash has partial 
support for csh compatibility. Specifically the ">&" syntax seems to 
work in bash where it wouldn't in a POSIX or Bourne shell. As for the 
difference between your experience and other users, maybe bash 
repented of this hack and removed it in a later version. Also, it 
behaves differently dpeending whether it was run as /bin/bash or as 
/bin/sh (the intent is that it be more POSIX- conformant as /bin/sh) 
so maybe there's a difference there. Or you may have the 
POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable defined while others don't. 
There are many possibilities but "GNU make defaults to the user's 
shell" is not one of them.