> I think we agree that autoconf is not at fault here. Yes, and neither is the shell. It is libtool who pollutes the name space.
However, I'll stress once more another lesson that you can take home. You wrote: > For years, I've been using $(ECHO) in Makefile.am's with an > AC_CHECK_PROG([ECHO], echo, echo) This is not necessary. You can just use echo, as it is a builtin and will be universally available; the only problem, which your technique doesn't solve anyway, is that it may not work when the argument contains backslashes or starts with a dash. In order to avoid rewriting your makefiles, just do AC_SUBST([ECHO], [echo]) for the time being. Paolo