How to use GNU Make on Windows?

Question

I installed MinGW and MSYS, added C:\MinGW\bin to PATH but I still can't run Makefile on Windows' cmd. I would like to run cmd.exe and there type, for example, make all but my cmd says that there is no such command.

What should I do? I don't want to use MSYS shell, that's not the point. Any ideas how to use GNU Make in Windows cmd as I can do it in Ubuntu? I'm not interested in Cygwin.

Solution 1

Here's how I got it to work:

  copy c:\MinGW\bin\mingw32-make.exe c:\MinGW\bin\make.exe

Then I am able to open a command prompt and type make:

  C:\Users\Dell>make
  make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found.  Stop.

Which means it's working now!

Solution 2

I'm using GNU Make from the GnuWin32 project, see http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ but there haven't been any updates for a while now, so I'm not sure on this project's status.

Solution 3

Although this question is old, it is still asked by many who use MSYS2.

I started to use it this year to replace CygWin, and I'm getting pretty satisfied.

To install make, open the MSYS2 shell and type the following commands:

# Update the package database and core system packages
pacman -Syu
# Close shell and open again if needed

# Update again
pacman -Su

# Install make
pacman -S make

# Test it (show version)
make -v

Solution 4

You can add the application folder to your path from a command prompt using:

setx PATH "%PATH%;c:\MinGW\bin"

Note that you will probably need to open a new command window for the modified path setting to go into effect.

Solution 5

As an alternative, if you just want to install make, you can use the chocolatey package manager to install gnu make by using

choco install make -y

This deals with any path issues that you might have.

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