I haven't looked at this hard. tftp-hpa's configure.in has a line that looks like this: AC_SEARCH_LIBS(xmalloc, iberty, , LIBXTRA=true [AC_LIBOBJ(xmalloc)]) Under autoconf-2.53 this eventually produced: LIBXTRA=true LIBOBJS="$LIBOBJS xmalloc.$ac_objext" while under autoconf-2.58 and -2.59 it produces: LIBXTRA=true case $LIBOBJS in "xmalloc.$ac_objext" | \ *" xmalloc.$ac_objext" | \ "xmalloc.$ac_objext "* | \ *" xmalloc.$ac_objext "* ) ;; *) LIBOBJS="$LIBOBJS xmalloc.$ac_objext" ;; esac and I see this on ome of my machines: ... tftp-hpa-0.28/configure: line 11526: syntax error near unexpected token `)' tftp-hpa-0.28/configure: line 11526: ` *" xmalloc.$ac_objext "* ) ;;' gmake: *** [foo] Error 2 the target machine is a redhat 7.3 box. While I'm digging to find the root cause, I wondered if it wouldn't be better in general if the test was something more like: LIBXTRA=true case " $LIBOBJS " in *" xmalloc.$ac_objext "* ) ;; *) LIBOBJS="$LIBOBJS xmalloc.$ac_objext" ;; esac And I have vague recollections of several older shells hating something that looked like that... H (who may be too tired to think right now...)