[Dev-C++] OT: Long command-lines

[Abhijit S. <mu...@gm...>]

This is somewhat OT, but I'll post it anyway since it may be of use to many.

> One of the problems with gcc isn't gcc itself, but the command line of
> win32. Since the command line doesn't support arbitrary long command
> lines, some command lines that works perfectly on Unix machines will not
> work under Win32.

GCC-make uses a different way of talking to other such programs - they don't
use the shell at all (I read it in the DJGPP FAQ; Google should turn up more
info). When I read your mail, I tried this makefile:

-- Cut here --

OBJ_FILES=titan.o feebar.o losu.o foar.o into.o heaven.o andlast.o plugins.o
\
notepad.o emacs.o vi.o o.stuff and.o wha.o andagain.o foobar.o reefa.o \
sumdist.o laser.oi remac.o fury.o stupid.o comma.o stupid.o comma.o stupid.o
\
rehea.o historik.o lesa.o meaga.o simpson.o homer.o illiad.o anderson.o \
csda.o exams.o magic.lo distortion.zz foobarrr.ooo reak.o 3f.o andstuff.o \
like.o this.o and i suddenly realize that i don_t need the extension.

all:
	gcc -Wall $(OBJ_FILES)

-- Cut here --

And here's what GCC reported (only the last few lines are included) when I
ran `make':

-- Cut here --

gcc: i: No such file or directory
gcc: don_t: No such file or directory
gcc: need: No such file or directory
gcc: the: No such file or directory
gcc: extension.: No such file or directory
gcc: no input files
D:\CODE\MINGW\BIN\MAKE.EXE: *** [all] Error 1

-- Cut here --

Clearly, the above command-line is well over the COMMAND.COM line-length
limit of 128 chars. You should have no problem at all using MinGW make.

I also proceeded to repeatedly copy-paste the text so that the OBJ_FILES
variable came up to 283 lines, and `make' still ran fine.

This arbitrary-size command-line transfer works between any two programs
compiled using GCC, so the code must be integrated with the EXE loader. I
tried it with my version of MinGW32 (GCC 3.2) and my program recognized all
2302 args (from the above makefile of ~283 lines).

This will NOT work if you run your program from GUMHAND.COM, only from
within another GCC compiled program (I don't know about `cross-platform'
programs, like DJGPP <-> MinGW32).

--
Abhijit Shylanath
Homepage: http://mudeth.tripod.com/