Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
From:	fredex AT fcshome DOT stoneham DOT ma DOT us (Fred Smith)
Subject:	Re: When in Rome...
Organization:	None!
Message-ID:	<Er92M7.Evt@fcshome.stoneham.ma.us>
References:	<19980411014943 DOT AAD28260 AT ppp127 DOT cartsys DOT com>
Date:	Sat, 11 Apr 1998 12:56:31 GMT
Lines:	45
To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway:	from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp

Nate Eldredge (nate AT cartsys DOT com) wrote:
: At 03:11  4/9/1998 GMT, Edward F. Sowell wrote:

: >> Make cannot convert the slashes because it doesn't have the slightest
: >> idea which commands understand or don't understand forward slashes.
: >> Even more significant, Make doesn't know which arguments are file
: >> names and which aren't.  Clearly, changing '/' into `\' in strings
: >> which aren't file names would be disastrous.
: >Somehow, Borland, MS, and Symantec make programs deal with \. 
: > Surely this is not impossible with GNU make.
: Of course it is not impossible, it just can't be done without breaking
: existing Makefiles. GNU Make uses '\' as an escape character to prevent
: special interpretation of the following character, and this behavior has
: come to be expected of it. Changing it would be an awful lot of work and
: destroy compatibility.

I would go further. Make, remember, originated on Unix, and on Unix
using a backslash to escape the following character is a natural and
system-wide wayof handling special symbols. Therefore it's not JUST a
GNU make issue, it is the way make was originally INTENDED to work.
It's not the fault of the Unix designers that MSDOS uses a weird/
incompatible way of specifying directories (some other OSs have used
even weirder ones... anybody else here ever use Primos?) and that
various make clones for DOS are (in that respect at least) incompatible,
so naturally us unix-heads are reluctant to break all the Unix tools we
port to DOS.

But all this doesn't help the original poster to solve his problem.
I think that of the various proposals here, given the constraints and
needs facing the original poster, that likely his best solutions are
to either use mv instead of move (and cp or whatever as needed), or 
to try the subst feature of make.

It would be nice if we could accommodate needs like his more directly,
but as I said above, I think it would be at the (unacceptable) cost of
breaking the tools.

Fred
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