Make is Buggy (was \"special\" shells a security hole?)

[rlk at bacchus.UUCP]

In article <263 at its63b.ed.ac.uk> simon at its63b.ed.ac.uk writes:
]
]In article <13252 at sun.uucp> guy at sun.UUCP (Guy Harris) writes:
]>Furthermore, it is a botch to *import* SHELL from the environment;
]>this causes Makefiles to work differently for people with different
]>login shells!  "make" should NOT import SHELL.
]
]And it *certainly* should not attempt to import things like IFS!
]This can lead to extremely confusing bugs in complicated makefiles.
]The problem is that it strips out initial blank-space when assigning
]a make-variable (even from an environ-string), so IFS=" \t\n" gets
]changed to IFS="" (double-quotes inserted here by me for clarity), which
]can cause shell-scripts executed as subprocesses by make to go totally
]haywire!

It's bad enough that make imports PATH.  I was building something from
the source, and a couple of subdirectories failed.  Turned out it was
because the line in the makefile used a program in the working
directory, not prefixing it with ./ .  Since I don't have . in my path
for various reasons, the make blew out.

Of course, this is still better than some of the other things that
could have happened...but it was still messy.

Robert^Z