sed, as packaged with RH6.1-sparc, as well as a fresh compile of sed-3.02, fails to function accurately on my SparcClassic. It would reliably drop the first character of a file, and append a NULL value to the file on occasion. This effectively cripples a system by not allowing configure or other sed-intensive programs to function properly. I did manage to make it work by explicitly commenting out a #define in the sed-3.02 Makefiles: CPPFLAGS= -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 On a hunch (since the Classic isn't 64-bit), I commented everything after the = sign, and it appears to work fine. It had been causing annoying problems with autoconf scripts, but doesn't when compiled with this comment. I'm not sure what the setting really does, but it might be worth looking into for future RH-sparc releases. I'm also not sure if it would be a problem with sed, autoconf, or the system include files, but it manifests itself in sed, so here 'tis.
This is fixed in 6.2; it's a glibc problem, IIRC.