Problem in oct-conf.h when building on OSX

[John Swensen]

I am having a problem building Octave CVS (as of 9PM June 27th) on OSX.  
It seems like I had this problem once before and the solution was to 
make sure GNU SED was being used instead of the SED supplied by Apple 
with OSX, however that doesn't seem to work anymore.  The error occurs 
when compiling toplev.cc:
toplev.cc:803: error: unknown escape sequence: '\040'
toplev.cc:803: error: unknown escape sequence: '\040'
toplev.cc:803: error: unknown escape sequence: '\040'
toplev.cc:803: error: unknown escape sequence: '\040'
toplev.cc:803: error: unknown escape sequence: '\040'
toplev.cc:848: error: unknown escape sequence: '\040'
toplev.cc:848: error: unknown escape sequence: '\040'
toplev.cc:848: error: unknown escape sequence: '\040'
toplev.cc:848: error: unknown escape sequence: '\040'
toplev.cc:848: error: unknown escape sequence: '\040'
make: *** [toplev.o] Error 1

Line 803 involves the macro OCTAVE_CONF_DEFS and Line 848 involves 
OCTAVE_CONF_UGLY_DEFS.  I think the problem is that there are a couple 
of items in each of the defs that end up having the wring number of 
slashes.  That is, the first few items of both OCTAVE_CONF_DEFS and 
OCTAVE_CONF_UGLY_DEFS have five slashes
"-DPACKAGE_NAME=\\\\\ -DPACKAGE_TARNAME=\\\\\ -DPACKAGE_VERSION=\\\\\ 
-DPACKAGE_STRING=\\\\\ -DPACKAGE_BUGREPORT=\\\\\ ...<many more items 
here that look to be formed OK>"

I could be completely off base (and don't completely follow the make 
system and how/when oct-conf.h gets generated).  I have tried modifying 
these lines to see if it is the problem, but it seems as if oct-conf.h 
is getting regenerated every time I run make.

Any suggestions?

John Swensen

P.S. My configure line = "./configure CC=gcc-4 CXX=g++-4 F77=gfortran 
CPPFLAGS=-I/sw/include LDFLAGS=-L/sw/lib --prefix=/sw/opt/octave/2.9.12+"