Maybe this is actually a shell script issue, so I'm sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this (reputation suggests maybe it is?!)

#! /bin/sh

echo hi there
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I found this which talks (near the bottom) about 'DOS style line breaks'. Could this be the problem? If this is not a suitable place for this question, then I'll ask elsewhere (any suggestions?) but I'd appreciate some (more) monkish wisdom if anyone has any..

... 'DOS style line breaks'. Could this be the problem?

Actually, yes, playing some more with this (in particular with a csh compatible shell), I do in fact obtain similar effects when the entire script has DOS/Windows style line endings... (just fixing the problem on the shebang line is not sufficient).  Not sure how those \r got in the file... did you edit Configure prior to running it initially?  Anyhow, this should fix the problem (at least with this very file...):

perl -i -pe 's/\r//g' ./Configure
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(Well, if you already have any perl installed, that is... Otherwise, look for some tool like dos2unix, or similar)

Ah, lovely, thankyou---I didn't know what the 'DOS style line break' character was in perl. I've already got Perl 5.8.5. I tried to install 5.10.0 back when I started to learn Perl but gave up pretty quickly when I thought I'd need root permissions. I thought it'd be good to have a play around with it now that I'm a bit more experienced.

thanks!
........
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.
-- Groucho Marx
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