regression script/makefile exit failure

I have seen several cases where either pg_regress appears not to exit 
with the expected non-zero exit status or "make check" does not 
apparently exit with the expected non-zero status.

In particular, I've seen it on cygwin, windows, and have at least a 
suspicion of it happening on FreeBSD.

The apparently offending code is this:
   message "initializing database system"   [ "$debug" = yes ] && initdb_options='--debug'   "$bindir/initdb" -D
"$PGDATA"-L "$datadir" --noclean 
 
$initdb_options >"$LOGDIR/initdb.log" 2>&1
   if [ $? -ne 0 ]   then       echo       echo "$me: initdb failed"       echo "Examine $LOGDIR/initdb.log for the
reason."      echo       (exit 2); exit   fi
 


and it's called from this makefile target:

check: all       -rm -rf ./testtablespace       mkdir ./testtablespace       $(SHELL) ./pg_regress --temp-install 
--top-builddir=$(top_builddir) --schedule=$(srcdir)/parallel_schedule 
--multibyte=$(MULTIBYTE) $(MAXCONNOPT)


The practical consequence of this is that instead of failing at this 
stage, the buildfarm script continues on until it somewhat inexplicably 
fails at the initdb stage.


Now, perhaps I'm calling it wrong, but I don't think so. The relevant 
perl code is this:
   my @makeout = `cd $pgsql/src/test/regress && $make check 2>&1`;   my $status = $? >>8;

which idiom seems to work as expected everywhere else quite happily. And 
in fact I've seen "make check" fail as expected on other failure paths 
(such as not matching the expected result.)



Anyone have any penetrating thoughts?

cheers

andrew