--- "Harig, Mark A." wrote: > Yes, autoconf uses sed many, many times. What is often possible is > to > narrow down which one by searching in 'configure' for the text > message > that 'configure' generates at the time that the script hangs, e.g., > "Checking for GNU c compiler..." Sometimes you may need to do this > several times. The better approach is to have a firm understanding > of > the layers of abstraction that autoconf builds on top of m4 and > automake > builds on top of autoconf, etc. but we're trying the > "brute-force-examine-the-assembly-language" approach. 'config.log' > is > sometimes helpful in providing clues about what might be causing > the > problem. Mark, I have attached a log of the configure session with set -xv. Don't worry, it bombs out early, so it isn't that big. I'll do the same procedure on win2k, if you want. The offending checkpoint is: -enable-* | --enable-*) ac_feature=`expr "x$ac_option" : 'x-*enable-\([^=]*\)'` # Reject names that are not valid shell variable names. expr "x$ac_feature" : ".*[^-_$as_cr_alnum]" >/dev/null && { echo "$as_me: error: invalid feature name: $ac_feature" >&2 { (exit 1); exit 1; }; } ac_feature=`echo $ac_feature | sed 's/-/_/g'` case $ac_option in *=*) ac_optarg=`echo "$ac_optarg" | sed "s/'/'\\\\\\\\''/g"`;; *) ac_optarg=yes ;; esac eval "enable_$ac_feature='$ac_optarg'" ;; The options I'm passing are: CFLAGS=-O2 \ LDFLAGS= \ CC=gcc-2 \ CXX=g++-2 \ ../dist/configure --target=i686-pc-cygwin --prefix=/usr --exec-prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --bindir=/usr/bin --libdir=/usr/lib --includedir=/usr/include/db3.1 --datadir=/usr/share '--libexecdir=${sbindir}' --localstatedir=/var '--program-transform-name=s,^db_,db3.1_,' --enable-posixmutexes --enable-dynamic --enable-cxx --enable-compat185 --disable-test If you (or anyone else) are interested in seeing what it does on your system, you can grab the self-contained build system at: http://today.clemson.edu/temp/db-3.1.17-1-src.tar.bz2 Untar to a temporary dir and run the buildscript like so: ./db-3.1.17-1.sh prep Then edit the configure script [db-3.1.17/dist/configure] adding your -xv flags to line 1 and line 155 [exec "$CONFIG_SHELL" "-xv"]: Then run: ./db-3.1.17-1.sh conf It should run fine on win2k, but winme/9x it doesn't. I'm going to try and examine it some more, but I thought I'd bring you in on it. Cheers, Nicholas __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - Feel better, live better http://health.yahoo.com