texi2dvi unexpected behaivoir

[d . gerbet]

Dear developers,

when compiling tex documents using texi2pdf, texi2pdf returns 1,
although a pdf-file is generated after exactly one compilation cycle.
Within the document the references are missing. A minimal example to
reproduce the behaviour is this file:

foo.tex
---
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\section{foo}\label{foo}
foo \ref{foo}
\end{document}

compiled using
$ texi2pdf -D -V -c foo.tex

I traced the script until the following point:
texi2dvi line 991 in function 'filter_files':
  test -n "$xref_files_new" && echo "$xref_files_new" |
It seems that the script traps at this point and calls the function
'cleanup'. I my case, the string "$xref_files_new" has length zero, so I
would expect that the command fails. 
On the other hand, a second call to texi2pdf works, if not in clean
mode. Maybe I am using this helper script in a wrong way, but from the
description I would expect, that the file above should be complied two
times by texi2dvi with return value 0. 
If however the function is changed to

filter_files ()
{
  if [ -n "$xref_files_new" ] ; then
          echo "$xref_files_new" |
          # Filter existing files matching the criterion.
          #
          while read file; do
            $1 "$file"
          done |
          sort |
          # Some files are opened several times, e.g., listings.sty's *.vrb.
          uniq
  fi
}

(note that just test is replaced by an if-clause), everything works as
expected for me. 

My environment:

$ texi2dvi --version
texi2dvi (GNU Texinfo 6.1) 6991

Copyright (C) 2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

$ pdflatex --version
pdfTeX 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.16 (TeX Live 2015/Arch Linux)
kpathsea version 6.2.1
Copyright 2015 Peter Breitenlohner (eTeX)/Han The Thanh (pdfTeX).
There is NO warranty.  Redistribution of this software is
covered by the terms of both the pdfTeX copyright and
the Lesser GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file
named COPYING and the pdfTeX source.
Primary author of pdfTeX: Peter Breitenlohner (eTeX)/Han The Thanh (pdfTeX).
Compiled with libpng 1.6.21; using libpng 1.6.21
Compiled with zlib 1.2.8; using zlib 1.2.8
Compiled with poppler version 0.42.0

$ uname -srvo
Linux 4.5.1-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Apr 14 19:19:32 CEST 2016 GNU/Linux

Yours sincerely

Daniel Gerbet