Hopeful patch for configure breakage

[Zack Weinberg]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2001 at 08:23:54PM -0500, Kaveh R. Ghazi wrote:
> 
>  > Yes, but does it cause trouble in practice?  The alternatives we have
>  > are (a) back out the patch (something I would prefer to avoid, but it
>  > may be necessary), (b) figure out a way to compile and run a program
>  > on the build machine (which can be done, but would be a pain).
>  > zw
> 
> Why aren't we using the `strings' program?  Is it not ubiquitous?

Without -a it cannot be counted upon to print out the strings we want,
and -a is not ubiquitous.

Also, there is a chance that we'll get an unprintable character in the
middle of the pattern that should have matched.  This will definitely
happen to the PDP-10 port, and could happen to the EBCDIC hosts in the
presence of last-hex-digit rounding, which is known to happen already.

I'm going to look into using od to convert the object file into
something we can grep safely.

zw