using /bin/sh in make commands

[Marty]

In making a large system, I stumbled across some interesting behavior I'd
like some help with.

Often people have rules in makefiles of the form:

DIRS=lib src

foo:
	for i in $(DIRS); do \
		(cd $$i; $(MAKE) foo); \
	done

It seems if one of the sub-makes fails, the shell loop  continues.

The Bourne shell has a -e flag to exit immediately on errors.
Unfortunately a line like:
SHELL=/bin/sh -e
doesn't work.  (make tries to exec "/bin/sh -e").

Is there a good way to get the functionality I'm looking for without having
to hack up all the makefiles?


This seems to be somewhat unexpected when making systems (i.e. generally a
make should stop when a command fails).

marty
ARPA:	leisner.henr at xerox.com
GV:  leisner.henr
NS:  leisner:wbst139:xerox
UUCP:	hplabs!arisia!leisner