if SHELL not set, COMSPEC used - not working?

[Mark Galeck (CW)]

The GNU Make manual says: 

"On MS-DOS, if SHELL is not set, the value of the variable COMSPEC (which is 
always set) is used instead."

This does not seem to work for me?  Why, is this a bug?  

Let me show you - as you can see, make did not call upon the value in COMSPEC, 
but instead went to a Unix shell, which I also have installed, and which does 
not have "ver" command:


D:\tmp>ver

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]

D:\tmp>type makefile
foobar:
                ver
D:\tmp>set COMSPEC
ComSpec=C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe

D:\tmp>make foobar
ver
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, ver, ...) failed.
make (e=2): The system cannot find the file specified.
make: *** [foobar] Error 2

D:\tmp>