make & ksh

[Paul De Bra]

In article <10433 at bigtex.cactus.org> james at bigtex.cactus.org (James Van Artsdalen) writes:
>Someone said:
>>     We had the second problem too, and tracked down to a bug in
>> make that was triggered by Aspen ksh.  ksh exports the _
>> environment variable, and when make is looking at the env for
>> variables, it croaks on the non-alphanum character.
>
>I can't duplicate this behavior.  GNU make doesn't have this problem
>at all, nor did AT&T make when I tried it.  I never run sh, just ksh.
>...

You cannot duplicate this behavior with any other make, because it must be
a bug in the System V make.
I have seen exactly the same problem on SCO Xenix 2.1.3. It seems strange
that Xenix make and uport make have the same problem and some AT&T make
doesn't.
My fix at that time was to change the '_' into 'Z' in ksh, figuring that
no other utilities would use an environment variable 'Z'.
I believe the problem was fixed in SCO Xenix 2.2.
Don't know whether uport has looked at the problem yet.

Paul.


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