When building from git, ./bootstrap ends up generating (via automake) several Makefiles that set SHELL = /bin/sh. However, some targets contain rules that make use of bashisms. This leads to breakage when /bin/sh is something other than bash. In particular, I am building from a foreign distro which links /bin/sh to dash. Currently, this ends up breaking the build, the details of which I reported to guix-devel in [0]. As a workaround, at the moment we have to force make's SHELL to point to bash. The cleanest way to do this is probably as follows: $ make SHELL=$(command -v sh) since from within guix environment --pure guix, sh ends up pointing to bash. Just for clarity, here is how this looks for me, currently: $ git rev-parse HEAD 2708ae3d69b54d8323ca84fd9a7fb108a6ee96ba $ guix environment --pure guix $ readlink -f $(command -v sh) /gnu/store/29jhbbg1hf557x8j53f9sxd9imlmf02a-bash-minimal-5.0.7/bin/bash [0]:https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2020-04/msg00232.html