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From: simon@its63b.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Make is Buggy (was \"special\" shells a security hole?)
Message-ID: <263@its63b.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, 14-Feb-87 16:07:41 EST
Article-I.D.: its63b.263
Posted: Sat Feb 14 16:07:41 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 16-Feb-87 06:47:53 EST
References: <3953@brl-adm.ARPA> <2590002@hpisod2.HP>
Reply-To: simon@its63b.ed.ac.uk (ECSC68 S Brown CS)
Organization: I.T. School, Univ. of Edinburgh, U.K.
Lines: 23
Keywords: make, sh, IFS, export, SVR2
Summary: System-V "make" environ-importing is silly


In article <13252@sun.uucp> guy@sun.UUCP (Guy Harris) writes:
>Furthermore, it is a botch to *import* SHELL from the environment;
>this causes Makefiles to work differently for people with different
>login shells!  "make" should NOT import SHELL.

And it *certainly* should not attempt to import things like IFS!
This can lead to extremely confusing bugs in complicated makefiles.
The problem is that it strips out initial blank-space when assigning
a make-variable (even from an environ-string), so IFS=" \t\n" gets
changed to IFS="" (double-quotes inserted here by me for clarity), which
can cause shell-scripts executed as subprocesses by make to go totally
haywire!

	Simon.

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Simon Brown
Department of Computer Science
University of Edinburgh
Scotland, UK.
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"Life is like that, you know"	 [anon.]