🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2888@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> fritz@polecat.Caltech.EDU (Fritz Nordby) writes:
>I don't know if this has been noticed before, but there is a severe problem
>with make and Bourne shell scripts.  If the IFS environment variable is set
>when make is invoked, then make resets IFS to an empty string.  This almost
>guarantees that Bourne shell scripts will die horribly.

It's not that it resets it to an empty string explicitly - it's a side-effect
of the way that Make sets up make-variables from the environment list. What
it does is it parses each environ entry for <name>=<value>, and then just
simulates an assignment (such as <name> = <value> inside a Makefile). Of
course, it strips out any "whitespace" between the <name> and the <value> -
which is very embarassing for variables such as IFS in which the whitespace
is an important part of the <value>.
The same problem occurs for ANY variable which has an initial whitespace 
component - the whitespace will get stripped off by Make.


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