Having applied the workaround of using "ls" in the configure test, my tests still don't run because the LOG_COMPILER trick suggested in the gnulib manual doesn't take account of libtool wrappers. Net result: valgrind is being called on bash (as it runs the test binary's wrapper script).
This is a separate issue, though: the real problem here is that a way is needed to run libtool wrappers with libtool, so that they are executed as: libtool --mode=execute valgrind $LIBTOOL_WRAPPER_SCRIPT The problem is that it's not obvious where the responsibility should lie. I don't expect automake to go examining all my test scripts to see if they look like libtool wrappers; on the other hand, I'm not sure what libtool can do, since by the time its wrapper has been run under valgrind, it's too late. For now I'll simply write manual scripts to call my tests and pass the value of $VALGRIND in, but I would appreciate suggestions here. I find valgrind invaluable, so making it easy to run such tests (so that it's just a question of adding the "valgrind-tests" module to one's project and making a couple of Makefile.am settings) would be great. I guess one further option is to fix the bug in bash, and then call valgrind with --trace-children=yes. Maybe that would be cleanest and simplest (albeit we'll need a workaround until fixed bash is widely available). -- http://rrt.sc3d.org