Makefile can't see sh or bash cygwin bins using enviroment variable

Question

At my office we recently got a laptop replacement and now one of my colleagues and myself are having issues compiling our code.

One of our compilations tools requires Cygwin 32-bits version, I freshly installed one and my colleague copied and paste the one he had on its previous laptop. The computer we got are 64-bits but the previously ones we had were also 64-bits.

Both of us are having the issue that makefile returns this error:

make: "C:\cygwin\bin"/sh: No such file or directory
make: *** [Makefile:401: clean] Error 127

The way we're defining "C:\cygwin\bin" is using an environment variable CYGWIN_BINDIR and we call it like this in the makefile:

export CAT = "$(CYGWIN_BINDIR)"/cat
export TOUCH = "$(CYGWIN_BINDIR)"/touch
export SHELL = "$(CYGWIN_BINDIR)"/sh      <----Complaining part
export COPY = "$(CYGWIN_BINDIR)"/cp
export PERL = "$(CYGWIN_BINDIR)"/perl

I can see that the binary for sh exists in the given path, I know we're mixing backslashes with normal slash but I read that cygwin takes care of fixing this and we've been compiling like this for years.

If we modify from:

export SHELL = "$(CYGWIN_BINDIR)"/sh

To:

export SHELL = sh

Now the makefile is able to use the binary, it seems like only sh is the one complaining since all the other binaries like cat/touch/cp/etc... are being used by the makefile properly.

Any ideas of what are we missing here?

As I mentioned we've been using this for years. I don't know what are we missing in our cygwin set up.

Answer 1

The issue here was that make (as it supposed to work) is handling double quotes as another character and is not expanding it as other interpreters do, like for example a shell interpreter.

Therefore make is trying to set the SHELL variable to the path "C:\cygwin\bin"/sh including double quotes and obviously that path doesn't exist.

Notice cygwin is capable of handle backslash and normal slash, even mixed.

This was fixed using a very old version of cygwin, where the double quotes are used to interpret backslashes, otherwise the path "$(CYGWIN_BINDIR)"/sh instead of being expanded to C:\cygwin\bin/sh is expanded to C:cygwinbin/sh.

I know we could have fixed our makefile to work with latest version of cygwin, but since this is a legacy project linked to other legacy tools we decided to use an older version of cygwin.