jar@ZURICH.AI.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Rees) (02/14/90)
The "make" supplied by at least two different vendors (HP and Sun(?)) supports the following feature: I can write a variable assignment of the form VAR = `a shell command` (e.g., DIR = `pwd`) and get behavior analgous to that of csh. In GNU make, I instead write VAR = $(shell a shell command) Now I can easily believe that GNU make is doing "the right thing," but my problem is that I can't think of anything I can write in a makefile to get this effect, such that the makefile will work either with GNU make or HP (etc.) make. Isn't this contrary to the usual policy for GNU utilities? The GNU make manual explicitly mentions the correspondence between $(shell ...) and `...`, so I assume you don't consider the incompatibility a bug; but why isn't it, and do you have any suggestions for a workaround? Thanks, and keep up the good work, Jonathan Rees