Re: GNU Make on Linux Feeding All Commands Through ksh

[David Boyce]

On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 12:31 PM, Steve Waltner <address@hidden> wrote:
> - The makefiles include settings like "override SHELL = /bin/ksh" to force
> all shell interpretations to go through the ksh.
>
> It appears as though the Linux system feeds every command through a ksh
> process, while the same function on the Solaris system calls the command
> (wether it is a ccpentium, ccarm, or make command) directly.

Are you sure that SHELL = /bin/ksh setting is present on both
platforms? Because the standard behavior of GNU make is to try to
avoid using the shell (to "call the command directly") wherever
possible, *unless* the value of $(SHELL) has been overridden. This is
a good thing, because once the user has swapped in his own shell
there's no way for make to know what its special characters, parsing
rules, etc might be, so it skips the optimization and just throws the
command line at the new value of $(SHELL).

So, regardless of your Solaris/Linux and -j issues, the first mystery
to be solved is why you are not seeing $(SHELL) be executed on
Solaris. Is it possible you're using a strict-POSIX configuration of
Solaris, wherein /bin/sh becomes the POSIX shell aka ksh, and have
become reliant on that?

David Boyce