Whoops, you are absolutely right.  I did not do the ash testing correctly, but I figured out why and retested.  The patch I gave you did not work under ash, and that was because of the extra back slash quotes, just like you say. I tested this new patch you sent under ash and I also tested it with dash - it works there too. I have one more change for your patch - the comment about "scripts/config/mkconfigs" should be "scripts/mkconfigs".  This comment gets put into bbconfigopts.h.  I regenerated the diff with this additional change and attached it as "4.sed.patch".  I also fixed the awk-only version and retested it under ash.  I attached it as "4.awk.patch".   I personally like the awk-only version a little better because it is only one invocation vs. three invocations and two pipes for the sed | grep  | awk version, and maybe more because it is a slick awk one-liner - but its trivial, really.  It's just a shell script that is part of the build process.  They both work to get the job done so they both work for me. Thanks Brion <div>On 2/3/07, Denis Vlasenko <<a href="mailto:vda.linux@googlemail.com">vda.linux@googlemail.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Saturday 03 February 2007 06:14, Brion Finlay wrote: > The fix that could be made to scripts/mkconfigs in order to work more > generally, be less indirect, and avoid some of the backslash quoting would > be to eliminate the echo "`...`" construction and just execute the command > directly.  That is, change this: > > echo "`sed 's/\"/\\\\\"/g' $config | grep "^#\? \?CONFIG_" | awk '{print > "\\"" $0 "\\\\n\\"";}'`" > > to this: > > sed 's/\"/\\\\\"/g' $config | grep "^#\? \?CONFIG_" | awk '{print "\"" $0 > "\\n\"";}' > > I tested this change under bash and dash and it works in both shells. But it doesn't work for me. ;) Your sed should have three \\\ instead of five. Can you try the attached patch? Will apply if it also works for you. -- vda </blockquote></div>