Feel free to direct me elsewhere if this is not the proper list for this report. I have not found any similar reports, either in the autoconf archives or elsewhere, but it's certainly possible that I didn't look in the right place. In attempting to build some of the GNU development tools on a Linux system that lacks them, I am encountering issues when config.status attempts to generate Makefiles for "po" directories. For example, this sed command (reformatted, and with some parts not relevant to the current issue omitted): sed -e "/^POTFILES =/r $ac_dir/POTFILES" \ -e "/^# Makevars/r $ac_given_srcdir/$ac_dir/Makevars" \ -e "s|@POFILES@|$POFILES|g" \ ... \ -e "s|@POMAKEFILEDEPS@|$POMAKEFILEDEPS|g" \ "$ac_dir/Makefile.in" > "$ac_dir/Makefile" produces this error message when executed (while attempting to build GNU make): config.status: executing po-directories commands config.status: creating po/POTFILES config.status: creating po/Makefile sed: -e expression #1, char 14: e/r/w commands disabled in sandbox mode config.status: creating build.sh leading me to suspect that this system's native sed has been crippled to always operate in "sandbox" mode, even without "--sandbox" having been specified on the command line. The resulting po/Makefile does not resemble Makefile.in at all. Later on, when "./make DESTDIR=... install" descends into the po directory: Making install in po make[1]: *** No rule to make target 'install'. Stop. The same sed error message arises in attempting to build other GNU tools, including gettext (which is a dependency of GNU sed, so I haven't been able to build GNU sed to use in place of the system's crippled version). While the root cause of these failures is the broken sed, it would certainly help if configure checked for such breakage and generated a workaround when needed, e.g. replacing the above sed command with something along the lines of: sed -e '/^POTFILES =/+1,$d' \ -e "s|@POFILES@|$POFILES|g" \ ... \ -e "s|@POMAKEFILEDEPS@|$POMAKEFILEDEPS|g" \ "$ac_dir/Makefile.in" > Temp1 sed -e '1,/^POTFILES =/d' -e '/^# Makevars/+1,$d' \ -e "s|@POFILES@|$POFILES|g" \ ... \ -e "s|@POMAKEFILEDEPS@|$POMAKEFILEDEPS|g" \ "$ac_dir/Makefile.in" > Temp2 sed -e '1,/^# Makevars/d' \ -e "s|@POFILES@|$POFILES|g" \ ... \ -e "s|@POMAKEFILEDEPS@|$POMAKEFILEDEPS|g" \ "$ac_dir/Makefile.in" > Temp3 cat Temp1 "$ac_dir/POTFILES" Temp2 "$ac_given_srcdir/$ac_dir/Makevars" \ Temp3 > "$ac_dir/Makefile" rm Temp[123] _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf