I've just realized that all the makefiles I try to run fail on shell commands like:

copy srcfname dstfname
del fname

It's weird, because all compiler commands (gcc, ar, etc.) work perfectly, it's only the instruction for windows' command interpreter that fail.

The message is "copy: command not found" or "del: command not found" when I use make.
I just downloaded the latest mingw32-make, it gives the same errors with a slightly more verbose message, saying something about the "CreateProcess (...) failed".

It may be related to the command interpreter. I normally use 4DOS.COM, but I also tried running make on COMMAND.COM, with variable COMSPEC=C:\COMMAND.COM : It makes no difference.

My current workaround is to manually call the faulty commands since they are few, I considered creating a COPY.EXE and DEL.EXE but it feels a bit silly I'd rather understand what's happening.

(edit: Aaah I forgot to mark this post as a question, no cookies, sorry )

Yesterday it was on my first-time compilation of JGMOD (makefile) on Mingw.

(By the way I don't understand if a Mingw makefile should use bash commands (rm include/lib.h) or the DOS syntax (del include\lib.h)

Path was apparently ok, I made sure to leave only paths relevant to MSYS and checked "mingw32-make --v".
I guess I somehow crushed my MSYS installation... It's probably a bad idea to keep on the same machine DJGPP, MSVC, Cygwin, MSYS, and Mingw's gcc.

Shouldn't you be using cmd.exe instead of command.com? I thought command.com was only for compatibility purposes?