Windows 7 - 'make' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file
Your problem is most likely that the shell does not know where to find your make
program. If you want to use it from "anywhere", then you must do this, or else you will need to add the full path each time you want to call it, which is quite cumbersome. For instance:
"c:\program files\gnuwin32\bin\make.exe" option1=thisvalue option2=thatvalue
This is to be taken as an example, it used to look like something like this on XP, I can't say on W7. But gnuwin32 used to provide useful "linux-world" packages for Windows. Check details on your provider for make.
So to avoid entering the path, you can add the path to your PATH
environment variable. You will find this easily.
To make sure it is registered by the OS, open a console (run cmd.exe
) and entering $PATH
should give you a list of default pathes. Check that the location of your make
program is there.
In Windows10, I solved this issue by adding "C:\MinGW\bin" to Path then called it using MinGW32-make not make
This is an old question, but none of the answers here provide enough context for a beginner to choose which one to pick.
What is make
?
make
is a traditional Unix utility which reads a Makefile
to decide what programs to run to reach a particular goal. Typically, that goal is to build a single piece of software; but make
is general enough to be used for various other tasks, too, like assembling a PDF from a collection of TeX source files, or retrieving the newest versions of each of a set of web pages.
Besides encapsulating the steps to reach an individual target, make
reduces processing time by avoiding to re-execute steps which are already complete. It does this by comparing time stamps between dependencies; if A depends on B but A is newer than B, there is no need to make A
. Of course, in order for this to work properly, the Makefile
needs to document all such dependencies.
A: B
commands to produce A from B
Notice that the indentation needs to consist of a literal tab character. This is a common beginner mistake.
Common Versions of make
The original make
was rather pedestrian. Its lineage continues to this day into BSD make
, from which nmake
is derived. Roughly speaking, this version provides the make
functionality defined by POSIX, with a few minor enhancements and variations.
GNU make
, by contrast, significantly extends the formalism, to the point where a GNU Makefile
is unlikely to work with other versions (or occasionally even older versions of GNU make
). There is a convention to call such files GNUmakefile
instead of Makefile
, but this convention is widely ignored, especially on platforms like Linux where GNU make
is the de facto standard make
.
Telltale signs that a Makefile
uses GNU make
conventions are the use of :=
instead of =
for variable assignments (though this is not exclusively a GNU feature) and a plethora of functions like $(shell ...)
, $(foreach ...)
, $(patsubst ...)
etc.
So Which Do I Need?
Well, it really depends on what you are hoping to accomplish.
If the software you are hoping to build has a vcproj
file or similar, you probably want to use that instead, and not try to use make
at all.
In the general case, MinGW make
is a Windows port of GNU make
for Windows, It should generally cope with any Makefile
you throw at it.
If you know the software was written to use nmake
and you already have it installed, or it is easy for you to obtain, maybe go with that.
You should understand that if the software was not written for, or explicitly ported to, Windows, it is unlikely to compile without significant modifications. In this scenario, getting make
to run is the least of your problems, and you will need a good understanding of the differences between the original platform and Windows to have a chance of pulling it off yourself.
In some more detail, if the Makefile
contains Unix commands like grep
or curl
or yacc
then your system needs to have those commands installed, too. But quite apart from that, C or C++ (or more generally, source code in any language) which was written for a different platform might simply not work - at all, or as expected (which is often worse) - on Windows.