"Make" command for Windows - possible options?

So I ended up downloading Cygwin and used the "make" system that came with it. It worked perfectly! I honestly have no idea why the GnuWin32 "make" command didn't work, but I suppose this would be helpful to those who encounter the same issue in the future.

Microsoft's implementation of Make is nmake. I don't think it's as advanced as a lot of Make implementations from various Unices, but it should work for simple Makefiles.

As you found, a stand-alone make wasn't enough; you needed Cygwin.

make is a program that interprets a makefile and executes the commands in the makefile. But, what are those commands? If you look at your makefile you will see UNIX-style commands that are available in Linux, Mac OS X, or Cygwin but are not available in an off-the-shelf Windows system. Thus, simply grabbing a make wasn't enough.