/bin/sh: pushd: not found

I am doing the following inside a make file

pushd %dir_name%

and i get the following error

/bin/sh : pushd : not found

Can someone please tell me why this error is showing up ? I checked my $PATH variable and it contains /bin so I don't think that is causing a problem.

pushd is a bash enhancement to the POSIX-specified Bourne Shell. pushd cannot be easily implemented as a command, because the current working directory is a feature of a process that cannot be changed by child processes. (A hypothetical pushd command might do the chdir(2) call and then start a new shell, but ... it wouldn't be very usable.) pushd is a shell builtin, just like cd.

So, either change your script to start with #!/bin/bash or store the current working directory in a variable, do your work, then change back. Depends if you want a shell script that works on very reduced systems (say, a Debian build server) or if you're fine always requiring bash.

add

SHELL := /bin/bash

at the top of your makefile I have found it on another question How can I use Bash syntax in Makefile targets?