Re: AIX grep limitation: coreutils build failure

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Paul,

* Paul Eggert wrote on Sun, May 28, 2006 at 10:50:44AM CEST:
> 
> I'm a bit reluctant to rely on 'tr' given its portability hassles.

Well, the same can be achieved with (including M4 quoting)
   sed "s/[[$as_cr_Letters]]//g"

but I don't understand the portability problems given the specific tr
command I posted, so I don't know whether it would be an advantage.

> How about this patch instead?  It takes the opportunity to put
> in a small plug for GNU grep.

I don't mind the plug, but unfortunately, things are not so simple:
The `grep -c' apparently keeps going, and just omits counting the line
that was too long (as it happens, the LTLIBOBJS and the LIBOBJS
substitutions are in different conf$$subs.sed files).  This means we
both get a whole slew of errors
| grep: Maximum line length of 2048 exceeded.

while we're building up $ac_delim to be reallly long.  So then, at one
point it will be long enough to overflow every line, so `grep -c'
returns 0, and if we then change the match to be
  ,* | 0,*)

we'd finally get a config.status file.  Except that we run into the
issue that the conf$$subs.sed may now overflow the sed line length limit
(due to the huge $ac_delim).  And I'm not too fond of one tiny
| configure: WARNING: please consider using GNU grep instead

after dozens of grep warnings.

> Also, it optimizes the CEOF
> test a bit (invokes sed only once on the file).

Yeah, I meant to use it that way; thanks for catching this.

Thanks,
Ralf

>       * lib/autoconf/status.m4 (_AC_OUTPUT_FILES_PREPARE):
>       Don't assume 'grep' works on long lines, since AIX grep doesn't.