Re: Issue using "command" shell builtin in make rules.

[Nick Bowler]

On 11/18/17, Paul Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Tue, 2017-11-07 at 13:43 -0500, Nick Bowler wrote:
>> Is this behaviour intended?  I noticed the manual says "make may take
>> shortcuts that do not affect the results" but in this instance a change
>> in results is definitely observed.
>
> Well, technically "command" is not a valid POSIX shell built-in
> command, so relying on it in your makefile scripts without changing the
> SHELL variable to /bin/bash (or some other shell that supports
> "command") is incorrect.

"command" is a standard utility defined in POSIX.  It is an ordinary
utility (under the "Utilities" heading), rather than a special built-in.

However "command" can only reasonably be implemented as a shell built-in
because (among other things) the -V option has to know about currently-
defined shell aliases.

> However, even if you were to change SHELL to /bin/bash, it would still
> not work properly :).
>
> I updated the built-in command list to contain "command".  But what
> should really happen is make should re-try the slow path if the fast
> path fails with a "command not found" error... then we wouldn't have to
>  keep adding non-standard built-ins to these lists.

Sounds great.

Thanks,
  Nick