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
Back in the day i Borland C++ Free Command Line tools included a version of make which played well with the dos/windows command line. Probably still floating around somewhere.
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.
Related
I cannot use vcvarsall.bat from cygwin because cygwin overwrites environment variables (like PATH) and then the environment in cmd.exe, which is inherited from the cygwin BASH environment, finds the wrong cmake.exe.
Is there any pre-defined way to do this? Maybe without having to resort to opening a new shell window? Currently, I'm rewriting and stripping the entire PATH string. But now I have another issue: TEMP points to the wrong directory. I could just change that manually, but I really want it to adhere to original Windows behaviour.
If I wanted to compile code in java, I go to environment variables and set the PATH variable to the bin of the jdk on my computer. Now my command prompt recognizes commands like "javac" and "java" and I can compile/run code without any issues.
But if I wanted to compile code in C/C++, suddenly commands such as "gcc" or "g++" are no longer recognized by my command prompt because the PATH variable was overwritten to the java location. I could change it back to the location of my C/C++ compilers, but then my command prompt would no longer recognize the java commands.
How can you make the command prompt recognize all commands? There must be a better way than changing environment variables every time.
You can append all needed paths to your PATH variable. You will want to put them in order of priority, in case there are matches that may potentially be found on multiple path entries.
For example, for Windows:
set PATH=%JAVA_PATH%;%PATH%
set PATH=%CPP_PATH%;%PATH%
...
Or, as a single line:
set PATH=%JAVA_PATH%;%CPP_PATH%;...;%PATH%
(Hypothetical entries - substitute as appropriate.)
Trying to execute blat http://www.blat.net/ from a shell script. I set the environmental PATH variable, and i can call blat from any location with the command prompt. Sending email from the command line works fine. But I'm not able to call it from within a shell script.
The (simplified) script
#!/bin/bash
blat
I get:
$ sh script.sh
script.sh: line 2: blat: command not found
I also tried by specifying the absolute path C:/Windows/System32/blat but that didn't work either.
There are many ways to solve this. If you will only run blat from Bash, you can
just put it in /usr/local/bin AKA C:\cygwin64\usr\local\bin.
If you need to run it from Bash and cmd/PowerShell, Windows "out of the box" has
pretty poor support for that. With Linux/Bash your PATH will usually look
something like this:
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin
This is great because you have a system space, and a user space for programs.
However Windows looks like this:
C:\Windows\System32;C:\Windows
As you can see by default the PATH only has system space. This is bad because it
encourages people to do dumb things like put user programs alongside protected
operating system files. What Windows needs is the equivalent of
/usr/local/bin, a folder on the PATH, ahead of everything where people can
dump command line programs. Until that happens you just have to add your own:
Move blat.exe to C:\Users\<user>\Documents
Add that to PATH:
SETX PATH "%PATH%;C:\Users\<user>\Documents" /M
When you add it to Windows PATH, it automatically gets added to Bash PATH, so
the program should be available to all shells.
In a makefile, I have the following:
SHELL = $(SOME_DIRECTORY)/sh
showme:
echo $(SHELL)
This is on MS Windows. The situation is that make is in the PATH (or is being directly invoked) but an acceptable shell (i.e. sh.exe) is NOT in the PATH. Neither is it an option to globally modify the PATH variable to include a sh.exe (too much potential conflict between Cygwin, msysgit, and more). Therefore, make defaults to using the Windows cmd.exe command processor, which is hardly ideal.
It is an option to set a system-wide environment variable other than PATH however. So I had the bright idea of putting a path to the directory containing sh.exe in SOME_DIRECTORY and then using it in the SHELL variable in the makefile. But it's not working for some frustrating reason:
make
echo sh.exe
sh.exe
If I use any other variable than SHELL and echo it, then it prints the expected result. But of course that doesn't have the desired effect of changing the shell.
What am I missing here? What do I need to do to have an environment variable with a custom user-specified name (i.e. not SHELL, PATH, etc.) affect the shell used by make?
Which make are you using? GNU make (gmake) 3.82 is most common and it should work in the way you expect. As MadScientist notes, gmake behaves differently under windows wrt SHELL.
You should be able to set SHELL to the full path of an existing executable file, and gmake will use it to execute commands.
However: if SHELL is not set OR if it is set to a non-existent file, gmake will use the value of ComSpec (mind the caps) as the shell.
Is there an exe at the test path you're using? So $(SOME_DIRECTORY)/sh is an existing exe? (Note that you can omit the '.exe' and gmake will supply it for you, but the file must exist)
I have been trying to setup a environment variable in Cygwin using the command export PRIMOSBASE=/directory/for/primosfiles.
And when i check the variable using the command echo $PRIMOSBASE it shows the /directory/for/primosfiles. hopeful this means the environment variable is set.
But when i try to run a shell script(primos) for the /directory/for/primosfiles, it shows
./primos: line 8: /prilaunch.pl: No such file or directory
chmod: failed to get attributes of `step1.sh': No such file or directory
which means i have not set the PRIMOSBASE environment. could anyone please tell me where i am going wrong...
Thanks ...
Run
echo "export PRIMOSBASE=/directory/for/primosfiles" >> ~/.bashrc
to append the command to the end of your .bashrc file, so that the variable is set each time you use Cygwin. Then run
source ~/.bashrc
to make it take effect immediately.
NOTE: Make sure you use double brackets (>>) to append. It might be a good idea to make a backup of .bashrc just in case. If you're not comfortable with I/O redirection, an alternative is to edit .bashrc with an editor. I think vim is among the default tools in Cygwin.
I had a similar issue trying to get ANDROID_HOME to work in a Cygwin window. When I used the linux path separators, as follows
ANDROID_HOME=/cygdrive/c/Users/User/AppData/Local/Android/sdk my gradlew build script complained it couldn't find the sdk in ANDROID_HOME.
I eventually discovered that I had to set my environment variable in the Windows format, including Windows path separators '\', as follows
ANDROID_HOME=C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Android\sdk
Note: the PATH and several other environment variables set in Windows are converted into Linux format. I hope this helps others who want/need to use Cygwin + Windows + essentially Windows programs that need environment variables.