How can I stop the Z shell from conspiring to tamper with the output of GNU Make?

Question

My research suggests that the Z shell has close ties with two secret societies. These ties are revealed when contrasting the output of GNU Make when using bash vs. zsh. I would like to know how to configure my shell to foil whatever devious plans have been plotted against me.

1. Illuminati

   The object of this partnership seems to be to hide secrets in plain sight. Consider the output of the following simple Makefile:

   test:
       @echo "# header"
       @echo "line with a hash # in the middle"
   

   If I run this in my zsh shell, the first line is hidden from me. This isn't a problem with escaping the hash because (a) only the first line has a problem, (b) redirecting this to a file makes it show up fine, at which point cating the file to the same terminal shows up fine, and (c) if I copy from the terminal the text is actually there, it just shows up as black.

   

   How can I stop whatever zsh is doing to the output that hides secret messages so I can make fully informed decisions based on the output?

2. Freemasonry

   The object of this partnership seems to be to release as little information as possible about what's going on behind the scenes. Consider the output of this simple Makefile:

   test:
       for i in $$(seq 1 10); do echo -n "[$$i]"; sleep 1; done
   

   If I run this is in my zsh shell, the output is buffered somewhere until a newline is reached or the target is completed. Then and only then is anything given back to the terminal. This makes long running jobs that actually show something while they are working but don't include frequent line breaks in the output very hard to follow. By contrast the output I get from bash is much more informative.

   

   How can I stop whatever zsh is doing that censors the output until forced to reveal it so that I can see what's going on as it happens?

If any of this is relevant, I'm using GNU Make 4.2.1, Z shell 5.2, and running it inside of Tmux 2.4 in a Termite v12 window. My dotfiles are available for zsh, tmux and Termite.

Also note neither of these issues seem to have anything to do with the shell make runs internally as adding SHELL = bash to the Makefile doesn't change anything.

Answer 1

By not using add-ons whose purpose is exactly that.

It's not the Z shell doing this; nor tmux, nor termite.

You have installed an add-on from Prezto (or something similar) whose documented purpose is to "tamper with the output of GNU Make". The top of the add-on reads:

#
# Highlights make output.
#
# Authors:
#   Sorin Ionescu <[email protected]>
#

As you can see, when you ran

make test

you weren't running the actual make program, but were instead running the add-on named make that you installed. It, in turn, was running a command named colormake.

And what does colormake do? It runs make with its standard output and standard error not being a terminal device, piping them it into a Perl program that reads and processes its standard input one whole line at a time. You could actually reproduce all of the effects that you see, in any POSIX compatible shell, by doing the same thing:

/usr/bin/make test 2>&1 | colormake.pl

This is nothing to do with the Z shell and everything to do with the fact that you installed a plug-in that replaced the make command.

To witness the line at a time behaviour on its own, without the colourization and detection of comments and so forth that colormake.pl does, in any POSIX compatible shell run:

/usr/bin/make test 2>&1 | perl -e 'while (<>) { print $_ ; }'

So deinstall or disable the add-on that you installed.

Prezto replaces the diff command, too.

Further reading

• Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson. Colormake.
• Sorin Ionescu (2012). make. Prezto.
• Sorin Ionescu (2012). diff. Prezto.