Help: Make going wild

[Tadeusz Liszka <tad@comco.com>]

I have make calling user shell script, calling VC++ compiled code,
calling exec, calling rm and then (sometimes, but too often) rm goes
wild (takes all cpu time, grows in size to several megabytes) and I have
to kill it. Sometimes it is cp not rm.

Any suggestions ? I suspect CYGWIN with NT4sp4 because it happens on all
machines with sp4 but not on those with sp3.

Details:

I have big Unix application, FORTRAN, C, about 20MB of source, Tcl/Tk,
OpenGL, lex/yacc, and our own preprocessing on top of it. When porting
to NT I decided on redoing completely the make structure (old one was
way too complex) and, after several abortive attempts (long and bloody
Microsoft bashing skipped) zoomed on CYGWIN32, using gnu-make and gcc
for preprocessing, but using VC++ and PowerFortran for actual
compilation (do not ask who made this decision :). CYGWIN works GREAT.
The differences between the platforms are minimal (mainly compiler
options, renaming .obj .lib .exe, etc). Sometimes at the end of make I
got error message (sigbus or such), but it never affected the works.

This month I took this code and all make structure to another office and
installed it on their machines, HP Kayak, NT4, the main difference in
setup is that they upgraded to service pack 4. On their machines it
takes 4-5 attempts on the average to go through preprocessing phase (our
own code, generated by lex/yacc, and using lotsa exec's to move files
around). This code and the script calling it is fairly old (== tested
and trusted), I used MKS lex/yacc/VC5++ to build it, just because I need
it anyway in other place in make - I guess I could try to build it using
CYGWIN (bison, gcc) but it does not seem to be the culprit.

I have installed full.exe with all default settings, no other setup
except MAKE_MODE=UNIX and PATH, default mounts (text!=binary). The
problem happens when I execute make from any: DOS/tcsh/bash, there is
plenty of RAM and disk space.

How can I check if my cygwin is up-to-date ? Has anybody seen such
problems ? Are there some patches already ?

I subscribe to to the list, and was looking for related topics, but
found none.
-- 
Tadeusz
:: The public opinion should be alarmed by its own nonexistence
:: (512)467-0618 ext. 526 ::       Stanislaw J. Lec, trans. TJL