Null characters in config.status

[Norman, Ben]

Hi,

I manage a project that is developing several software packages (all happily 
using autotools for a couple of years now).  I have recently hit a very 
frustrating snag on one of my systems (Fedora 20 64-bit running under VMWare 
Workstation 10).  I have completely rebuilt the VM from scratch and have the 
same results.

To reproduce it simply, I downloaded a sample project from 
http://www.niksula.hut.fi/~mkomu/docs/autohowto.html.  The output from 
autogen.sh and configure are attached.  You will note that configure terminates 
with:

./config.status: line 331: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'
./config.status: line 331: `"'

This is because line 317 of config.status (attached) has almost 3000 null 
characters in it.  I am completely stumped.  The same thing happens in any 
autotools project I try to build.  Any ideas?

Thanks,
Ben

autogen.out
Description: autogen.out

configure.out
Description: configure.out

config.status
Description: config.status