Question

I am writing installation in a Makefile in which I need to set the PATH env. variable.

In the windows part of it, I found the following:

• set: With set PATH="%PATH%;%CD%" I can change the PATH inside the running environment. There are two problems with this:
  • The environment is a spawned cmd.exe by make which gets its variable affected and the effect removed as soon as it closes
  • Even if the previous problem could be solved, still the cmd.exe that calls make would close one day and the modified PATH lost.
• setx: A microsoft tool that can permanently change env. variables. According to microsoft itself, this is the only command-line option to do this. Using setx PATH "%PATH%;%CD%" -m however, turns path into the literal %PATH%;%CD% and doesn’t replace the variables by their contents!

Note that I am calling make from cmd.exe not cygwin or other modified windows shells that act more like linux. What I’m saying is that, although I can use $(PATH) in my makefile (instead of %PATH%), I can’t use pwd (instead of %CD%)

Also note that if in cmd itself I run:

setx PATH "%PATH%;%CD%" -m

it works perfectly. Somehow I need to make make execute this command.

Do you have any idea how to fix this, or what workaround do I have?

P.S. Just for the record, echo "%PATH%;%CD%" in the Makefile also echoes the literal "%PATH%;%CD%" rather than let cmd.exe handle it

Answer 1

Workaround:

Create a .bat file, put the command there, and invoke it from the Makefile.

I still am interested in a direct fix in the Makefile though.