Issue
It does not appear to be possible to call Windows system commands (e.g. del, move, etc) using GNU Make. I’m trying to create a makefile that doesn’t rely on the user having extra tools (e.g. rm.exe from Cygwin) installed.
When the following rule is run, an error is reported del: command not found:
clean:
del *.o
This is presumably because there is no such execuatable as “del”. I’ve also tried running it as an option to cmd but with this only seems to open a new prompt:
clean:
cmd /C del *.o
I’m using Windows XP (5.1.2600) with GNU Make 3.79.1 that is bundled as part of MSys.
Solution
It seems the /C switch needs to be escaped because a / is interpreted as a path in GNU Make. The following works as expected:
clean:
cmd //C del *.o
Answered By – TomLongridge
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