i have no idea what the quoting style/preference is in the GNU world, Nothing GNU-wide, but among autotools and related packages written/maintained by approximately the same group of people, I believe test x"$foo" = x1 is the most-usual style. Though "x$foo" is common too, since it makes no difference.
The "test" item, most of the way down in the "Limitations of Shell Builtins" node of the Autoconf manual, reports a lot of the things that have led to the common forms/workarounds. https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.69/html_node/Limitations-of-Builtins.html#Limitations-of-Builtins Not including the not-quoting of constant strings though, granted, since that also makes no difference. I can't recall any other style guide for shell coding conventions, either. Anyway, back to the bug topic. i think there's merit to issuing a warning Ok, I yield. No appetite to argue further over this tiny issue. configure user can (re)create dist tarballs too. not the common flow, Quite an understatement there :). the reason your system hit this code path I was not running make dist. I was just running configure on Solaris 5.10. As far as I can recall. it can be helpful when you're hacking on a system and want to pull the state back out. Personally, I would never trust make dist not to alter the state that it was supposedly snapshotting. But whatever. --thanks, karl.
