To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: SHELL variable in Makefiles
Date: Sun, 29 May 94 15:55:18 +0300
From: eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il

Once upon a time I had a Makefile which worked (with GNU Make 3.69 as 
distributed with DJGPP).  It had several rules with LONG command lines, but
it still worked OK, because Make knows how to work around DOS, even though
I work with ye olde COMMAND.COM (yes, I'm sure of it; there is no other
command processor NOWHERE on my disk).
One day I inserted a line in that Makefile saying:

	SHELL = c:\\dos\\command.com

Guess what?  The commands with LONG command line failed to see anything beyond
the 128-character limit :-(  I took the SHELL line out -- it worked OK again.

What's going on here?  Does the SHELL line somehow FORCES Make to call
COMMAND.COM even if it could do without it?  What is EXACTLY the effect of
SHELL= in the DOS version of Make?

I didn't try to spell it c:/dos/command.com.  Would it matter?

	Eli Zaretskii