Re: 1.10a instspc.test failure

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Patrick,

Thanks for the bug report.  Cc:ing bug-autoconf.

* Patrick Welche wrote on Sat, Dec 23, 2006 at 11:12:03PM CET:
> .. too many " and \ for me to work this one out! Output of instspc.test
> attached..

Seems NetBSD awk does not like carriage return in a string literal:

| + ../configure --prefix /-prefix
| checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
| checking whether build environment is sane... yes
| checking for a thread-safe mkdir -p... ../install-sh -c -d
| checking for gawk... no
| checking for mawk... no
| checking for nawk... no
| checking for awk... awk
[...]
| configure: creating ./config.status
| config.status: creating Makefile
| awk: non-terminated string /refix ... at source line 10 source file 
./conf09402a/subs.awk
|  context is
| ^I >>> S["prefix"]="/ <<< 
| sed: stdout: Broken pipe

Not sure what to do.  Does it swallow this with escaping?  Try
  awk 'BEGIN { x = "a\^Mb"; print x }' > file

(the ^M should be entered as CTRL-v CTRL-m) and look whether `file'
contains the letters a, carriage-return, and b.  That works for me
with Debian's original-awk.  But with mawk, an extra backslash ends
up in the file, and with GNU awk, I get an ugly warning:
| ' treated as plain ` sequence `\

I do wonder though whether processing carriage return correctly in
variable substitutions is important in real applications.  If yes,
then I guess another config.status-time awk test is in order.  WDYT?

Cheers,
Ralf