Null characters in config.status

[Norman, Ben]

Hi,

I manage a project that is developing several software packages (all happily using autotools for a couple of years now). I have recently hit a very frustrating snag on one of my systems (Fedora 20 64-bit running under VMWare Workstation 10). I have completely rebuilt the VM from scratch and have the same results.

To reproduce it simply, I downloaded a sample project from http://www.niksula.hut.fi/~mkomu/docs/autohowto.html. The output from autogen.sh and configure are attached. You will note that configure terminates with:

./config.status: line 331: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'
./config.status: line 331: `"'

This is because line 317 of config.status (attached) has almost 3000 null characters in it. I am completely stumped. The same thing happens in any autotools project I try to build. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Ben

[Paul Eggert]

Post by Norman, Ben
line 317 of config.status (attached) has almost 3000 null characters in it.

By my count it has 1424 null bytes, and they are inserted immediately
after the 8192nd byte, which suggests that your shell is buggy and is
creating a here-document incorrectly due to some buffer confusion.
Could be your VM, I suppose.

[Norman, Ben]

Yes, you are right; I was counting columns in emacs but didn't notice that it was reporting the two-byte on-screen width of the null character representation.

After several previous failed attempts, I downloaded the VMWare workstation 10.0.3 update (from 10.0.2), and the problem has now disappeared! There's no mention of any such issue in the release notes, of course...

Thanks,
Ben

________________________________________
From: Paul Eggert [***@cs.ucla.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2014 12:02 AM
To: Norman, Ben; ***@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Null characters in config.status

Post by Norman, Ben
line 317 of config.status (attached) has almost 3000 null characters in it.

By my count it has 1424 null bytes, and they are inserted immediately
after the 8192nd byte, which suggests that your shell is buggy and is
creating a here-document incorrectly due to some buffer confusion.
Could be your VM, I suppose.