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The limitations on the size of an action block can be removed with one of the extensions in my branch. I find with unlimited action sizes, and the newline expansion trick, the standard NT shell can be used for most of my actions. Where more complex logic is needed, I use perl.

The way to make this more useful is to set a bunch of variables on some target, each of which can grow to large lists.

For example, if you're building a shared object, you may want the list of object files and the list of archives in separate lists. I do this by setting different variables on the target. ie, something like:

OBJS on libfoo.dll += foo.o ; OBJS on libfoo.dll += bar.o ; ARCHIVES on libfoo.dll += liba.lib ; ARCHIVES on libfoo.dll += libb.lib ; ARCHIVES on libfoo.dll += libc.lib ;

where the above is done internally by my other rules. Then in the action block for building the shared object:

actions myBuildShared bind OBJS ARCHIVES { if exist $(<).objs $(RM) $(<).objs $(TOUCH) $(<).objs echo$(SPACE)$(OBJS)$(SPACE)>>$(<).objs$(NEWLINE)

if exist $(<).archives $(RM) $(<).archives $(TOUCH) $(<).archives echo$(SPACE)$(ARCHIVES)$(SPACE)>>$(<).archives$(NEWLINE)

$(LINK) ... @$(<).objs @$(<).archives ... }

it is sometimes better to pre-process files via separate actions, but the number of times I do that is much less now that it was when action blocks had a fixed size limit.

Cheers, Craig.