Re: [Bug-AUCTeX] auctex 11.85 configure hangs

[David Kastrup]

Ralf Angeli <address@hidden> writes:

> After this line and before the next echo statement in the configure
> script there are some while loops.  Perhaps those are a problem.  Here
> is one of them:
>
>  while :;do case "$tmpdir" in *\$*) __ac_tmp__='s/[\`"-"]/\\&/g'
> eval "tmpdir=`sed ${__ac_tmp__} <<EOF
> $tmpdir
> EOF
> `";; *) break ;; esac; done
>
> Do you perhaps know if such a construct is supported by your shell?
> (Frankly I am not an expert here.)  Also, is sed installed?

Well, the construct loops while there is a $ in "$tmpdir".  It breaks
out of the loop when there isn't.  That's quite straightforward.  The
sed command replaces the three characters \ ` " with \ followed by the
characters.  That gives an additional level of quoting which the eval
(which is there for expanding $ until none is left) then strips again.

It would be interesting to see what happens on the system where it
fails.  One thing that might help is writing
's/[\\`"-"]/
instead, doubling the initial \ in case sed misinterprets the range (I
am not sure why we have "-" instead of just ", probably to stop syntax
highlighting from going complete bonkers).

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum