Module Installation Related: MAKE and NMAKE

OxYgEn has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I previously made a post about some trouble I was having with installing modules. Well, I finally figured out how to do it with ActivePerl's PPM command, but it's very inconvenient, and since I downloaded this CYGWIN and NMAKE I'd like to understand how to use it
On the module installation post, several people told me I needed to use the make command on CYGWIN to get it to work. Well, when I do this it tells me there is no make command. And when I open NMAKE, this is what I get

PKSFX (R) FAST! Self Extract Utility Version 2.04g 02-01-93 Copr. 1989-1993 PKWARE Inc. All Rights Reserved. Shareware version PKSFX Reg. U.S. Pat. and Tm. Off. Searching EXE: C:/DOCUME~1/GREG/DESKTOP/GBA/NMAKE15.EXE PKSFX: (W18) Warning! NMAKE.ERR already exists. Overwrite (y/n)?

And when I type y, it just prints the same thing again and I can type y or n as many times as I like and it will keep going. Could someone please explain to me what I'm doing?

Thanks a lot,
~OxYgEn

Comment on Module Installation Related: MAKE and NMAKE

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Re: Module Installation Related: MAKE and NMAKE by Roger (Parson) on Mar 08, 2004 at 04:11 UTC
You have downloaded NMAKE15.exe, which is a self-extracting archive file. You need to go to a directory on the path, say, C:\Windows, and then run NMAKE15.exe to extract the nmake.exe and nmake.err etc files to that directory. To invode the make utility, type nmake.exe, not nmake15.exe.	[reply]
Re: Module Installation Related: MAKE and NMAKE by iburrell (Chaplain) on Mar 08, 2004 at 19:51 UTC
What version of Perl on Windows are you using? There are two very distinct distributions, Cygwin and ActivePerl. ActivePerl is compiled with Visual C and uses NMAKE. You can't compile binary extensions without Visual C. If you don't have Visual Studio, you can still build Perl modules if you get NMAKE. You seem to have the archive containing NMAKE. Cygwin is a Unix emulation environment and uses GCC and GNU Make. If you want to build Perl modules for Cygwin, you will need to install gcc and make through Cygwin setup. But the two environments are not compatible. It is theoretically possible to build extensions for ActivePerl with the Mingw GCC compiler and GNU Make, but it is not standard.	[reply]