Re: Win2K command shell

[Greg Chicares]

Bijal Shah wrote:
> 
> I don't know if anyone will be able to help me since I run "apparently" an
> unusal combination - I use GNU make with vanilla Windows CMD.EXE on Windows
> NT 4.0.
> 
> I have been asked to ensure that the build system I developed will work
> under Windows 2000. Normally, I would say this should be quite
> straight-forward but there appears to have been a change between the Windows
> NT and the Windows 2000 versions of CMD.EXE. Basically, the command line
> utilities now return error codes which can cause a build to fail where it
> worked fine under Windows NT 4.0. The specific instance I have identified
> thus far is the use of "DEL". This will now return an error if no files were
> found for it to delete.

Use gnu 'rm' instead. 'rm --force filespec' means
'ignore nonexistent files, never prompt'. It's
better than del, and your makefile will be easier
to port to another OS if the need ever arises.

> While not strictly a GNU make issue, I was wondering if anyone else had gone
> through this and whether there was either documentation available on the
> "new" CMD.EXE or if anyone has workarounds they can share.

I've just started using win2k (an NT variant).
I don't know which shell I'm using. But I've
noticed two peculiarities:

 - I needed to copy a certain DLL to a file with
   the same name but no extension, e.g.
      mydll.dll -> mydll

 - To run a certain program from the directory
   where it resides, I had to give it a path:
   '.\myprogram' instead of 'myprogram'. With
   the win95 family, the current directory was
   always implicitly on the path.