Re: Odd effects from setting SHELL?

[Philip Guenther]

On 6/25/07, Christian Convey <address@hidden> wrote
...
> Most users of the makefiles had no problems, but most users also had
> csh as their default shells.  I have bash as a default shell, and I
> had problems.  Specifically, lines like this:
>
>    makedepend >& /dev/null
>
> I said to myself, "That looks like valid csh redirection, but invalid
> bash redirection.  I  bet that's the problem.

As an extension, some versions of bash treat ">&word" as ">word 2>&1"
if 'word' doesn't expand to one or more digits or to just a hyphen.
Check your system's manpage and experiment a bit...


> 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.

Make will use /bin/sh by default when invoking commands, but by
default it does *not* override the value of SHELL in the environment
of the commands.  Indeed, if you don't explicitly set SHELL in the
makefile, then ${SHELL} will expand to the shell of the user invoking
make.  So, any rules that explicitly use ${SHELL} or that invoke
commands that use SHELL internally may behave differently for
different users.


Philip Guenther