it's an ugly, evil hack, but it seems to work.
and can i just say that it's damn annoying that solaris make doesn't do macro substitution inside a command substitution, so to get data from the makefile to the shell command you're using to generate another macro, you have to do evil evil things.
if someone knows of a way to export an environment variable inside a makefile, that would also solve my problem, but i can't seem to find a way to do that either. i'm sure my o'reilly's book on make would have some kind of answer for me, but i left it in CT... so i'm stuck with the evil solution...
oh well, at least it seems to work...
