desperate situation with $(shell ... :(

[Mark Galeck (CW)]

I have asked this question before, in an isolated example, and Paul said this 
is no problem what I am doing, but...  I have rare, impossible to reproduce, 
yet universally fatal failures...  I just want to make double sure, can anybody 
tell me there is anything wrong with this (I want to append the list to the 
file, and the reason why I can't just echo everything, is that this is Windows 
and there is command line length limitation, and the list can exceed that).  


$(foreach item, $(very_long_list), $(shell echo $(item)>>foobar.txt))


What I see in those rare unreproducible failures, is that some random element 
of in the middle of the very long list does not get appended to the file...  

The reason why I don't post this to the Windows GNU make list, is, seems to me, 
either I am not understanding how foreach, or shell, work, or if not, then 
there is a problem with my understanding of Windows, but not, the problem with 
my misunderstanding of Windows GNU make.  

Mark