Make is Buggy (was \"special\" shells a security hole?)

[simon at its63b.UUCP]

In article <13252 at sun.uucp> guy at 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.]