Bug 192793

Description of problem:

I'm trying to build otcl package (part of ns2 network simulator).
When running autoconf generated configure script, it'll fail with:

./configure: line 6027: syntax error near unexpected token `('
./configure: line 6027: `    case `(ac_space=' '; set | grep ac_space) 2>&1`
in'error: Bad exit status from /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.70778 (%build)

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

The 'ac_space' string occurs in general.m4 for the _AC_CACHE_DUMP check.
The following is extracted from the configure script which fails:

# The following way of writing the cache mishandles newlines in values,
# but we know of no workaround that is simple, portable, and efficient.
# So, don't put newlines in cache variables' values.
# Ultrix sh set writes to stderr and can't be redirected directly,
# and sets the high bit in the cache file unless we assign to the vars.
{
  (set) 2>&1 |
    case `(ac_space=' '; set | grep ac_space) 2>&1` in
    *ac_space=\ *)
      # `set' does not quote correctly, so add quotes (double-quote
      # substitution turns \\\\ into \\, and sed turns \\ into \).
      sed -n \
	"s/'/'\\\\''/g;
	  s/^\\([_$as_cr_alnum]*_cv_[_$as_cr_alnum]*\\)=\\(.*\\)/\\1='\\2'/p"
      ;;
    *)
      # `set' quotes correctly as required by POSIX, so do not add quotes.
      sed -n \
	"s/^\\([_$as_cr_alnum]*_cv_[_$as_cr_alnum]*\\)=\\(.*\\)/\\1=\\2/p"
      ;;
    esac;
} |
  sed '
     t clear
     : clear
     s/^\([^=]*\)=\(.*[{}].*\)$/test "${\1+set}" = set || &/
     t end
     /^ac_cv_env/!s/^\([^=]*\)=\(.*\)$/\1=${\1=\2}/
     : end' >>confcache
if diff $cache_file confcache >/dev/null 2>&1; then :; else
  if test -w $cache_file; then
    test "x$cache_file" != "x/dev/null" && echo "updating cache $cache_file"
    cat confcache >$cache_file
  else
    echo "not updating unwritable cache $cache_file"
  fi
fi
rm -f confcache


How reproducible:

Always.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Run autoconf on package which loads the _AC_CACHE_DUMP check.
2. execute the configure script
3. configure fails with syntax error
  
Actual results:

syntax error encountered in configure script.

Expected results:

_AC_CACHE_DUMP check will proceed successfully.

Additional info:

If I edit configure script and change the shell in line 1 to /bin/ksh, the
script will run to completion. This indicates that there is some interaction
between bash 3.1 and autoconf which was not present in earlier releases (AFAIK).

I've tried this with the FC5/testing versions of bash and autoconf with the same
results.