/bin/sh: pushd: not found

Question

I am doing the following inside a make file

pushd %dir_name%

and i get the following error

/bin/sh : pushd : not foun         


        

Answer 1

This is because pushd is a builtin function in bash. So it is not related to the PATH variable and also it is not supported by /bin/sh (which is used by default by make. You can change that by setting SHELL (although it will not work directly (test1)).

You can instead run all the commands through bash -c "...". That will make the commands, including pushd/popd, run in a bash environment (test2).

SHELL = /bin/bash

test1:
        @echo before
        @pwd
        @pushd /tmp
        @echo in /tmp
        @pwd
        @popd
        @echo after
        @pwd

test2:
        @/bin/bash -c "echo before;\
        pwd; \
        pushd /tmp; \
        echo in /tmp; \
        pwd; \
        popd; \
        echo after; \
        pwd;"

When running make test1 and make test2 it gives the following:

prompt>make test1
before
/download/2011/03_mar
make: pushd: Command not found
make: *** [test1] Error 127
prompt>make test2
before
/download/2011/03_mar
/tmp /download/2011/03_mar
in /tmp
/tmp
/download/2011/03_mar
after
/download/2011/03_mar
prompt>

For test1, even though bash is used as a shell, each command/line in the rule is run by itself, so the pushd command is run in a different shell than the popd.