Re: Crash on Windows when SHELL is assigned

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Orgad Shaneh <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2017 23:13:26 +0300
> 
> 1 You must use a full name for SHELL, including the extension (SHELL=sh 
> doesn't work. SHELL=sh.exe
>  does, if sh.exe exists in PATH). PATHEXT should be used for the executable 
> detection.

Can you tell why this is a problem?  There's no equivalent of PATHEXT
on Posix systems, and no one coded anything like that for Windows.  Is
it really such a serious problem?  If so, in what use cases?

> 2 It looks like if PATH contains quotes, they're treated in a strange manner. 
> Instead of just removing
>  (unescaping) them, make looks for <run directory>\"some directory in quotes" 
> (observed with Process
>  Monitor). The quotes must be removed before calling _access().

An example would help, but generally speaking PATH with quotes is
invalid; see for example this post:

  
https://serverfault.com/questions/349179/path-variable-and-quotation-marks-windows

If we accept that such values of PATH is invalid, then what you
describe hits "undefined behavior", and Make is not at fault.  If you
disagree, please describe use cases where it is hard or impossible to
fix PATH so that it has no quotes.

> 3 If the shell is not found, make crashes. do_variable_definition() reaches 
> lookup_variable(), which returns
>  NULL. Then the NULL v is dereferenced (v->append = append etc.)
>  I tried adding NULL validations. This prevents the crash, but then SHELL=sh 
> becomes the target instead of
>  declaring a variable (*** No rule to make target 'SHELL=sh'. Stop.)

I cannot reproduce this in simple Makefiles I tried.  The most severe
problem I saw was this:

  D:\usr\eli\data>make -f-
  SHELL=sh.exe

  all:
          $(SHELL) -c echo foo
  ^Z
  sh.exe -c echo foo
  process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, sh.exe -c echo foo, ...) failed.
  make (e=2): The system cannot find the file specified.
  make: *** [D:/usr/tmp/Gma08172:4: all] Error 2

which doesn't fit your description.  Can you show an example where
Make crashes due to NULL pointer dereference?

And one more thing: you didn't say which version of Make did you use
in your testing, and where/how did you obtain its binary; I used the
latest version 4.2.1.  Should you wish to try the version I use, you
can find its precompiled binaries here:

  https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/?source=navbar

Thanks.