Re: gmake troubles under Win XP -- opening shells instead of executing commands

[Stan Brown]

On Wed, 15 Jun 2005 11:13:51 -0700, "Damian Stones"
<damian@neversoft.com> wrote:

>"Stan Brown" <the_stan_brown@fastmail.fm> wrote in message
>news:3a3c9bF66ta6fU1@individual.net...
>> Windows XP Pro with SP2
>>
>> GNU Make version 3.79.1, by Richard Stallman and Roland McGrath.
>> Built for i386-pc-msdosdjgpp
>>
>>
>> Since I changed from Win 98 to Win XP, gmake has been behaving in
>> all sorts of flaky ways. I'd be very grateful if somebody can tell
>> me what is wrong.
>>
>> (One thing that makes this hard to diagnose is that the output of
>> "make -n" is, amazingly, _not_ the commands that make actually
>> executes without the "-n". It sure would be nice if there were some
>> way to find out what commands MAKE is actually executing.)
>>
>> When I run it with "make 4INDEX.HTM -n" it correctly displays the
>> commands that I expect to see, namely
>> > ver
>> > echo f:\ors\code\makesub ./ 4INDEX.HTM ./ 4INDEX.HTM ./4.DEF 4INDEX.0
>> > f:\ors\code\makesub ./ 4INDEX.HTM ./ 4INDEX.HTM ./4.DEF 4INDEX.0
>>
>> But when I type "make 4INDEX.HTM" without the -n, things go flaky.
>>
>> (a) MAKE opens a new command shell and then leaves me with a user
>> prompt.
...
>> (e) As mentioned above, "make -n" doesn't actually show the
>> commands that make executes without the "-n".
>>
>> I'm completely at a loss. I'll be happy to provide additional
>> information or run additional tests if someone can help me track
>> down and ultimately fix this problem.

>Very late reply - and possibly of no use to you whatsoever but are you
>making sure to tell GNU Make to use Win32 command line options when invoking
>the shell? You need to add the option "-win32" (no quotes) otherwise when it
>invokes your command shell to execute a command,  it doesn't start in
>immediate mode and opens a window for user input...

Thanks for the reply. I tried -win32 on the make command line, and
it responded with a list of options (which didn't include that one).
I tried -win32 on a command line inside my rules, and the symptoms
were still the same.

It would help in diagnosing this if I could find out what commands
MAKE actually passes to the command processor. Does anyone know how
to do that, short of altering the source code and recompiling?

-- 
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
                                  http://OakRoadSystems.com/
"My theory was a perfectly good one. The facts were misleading."
                                   -- /The Lady Vanishes/ (1938)