The configure script's check for a compatible 'grep' fails when the one on my system apprears to be acceptable. My OS is LynxOS 4.0 and my grep version is... $ grep -V GNU e?grep, version 1.6 There are two issues why this fails. First, my grep does not support long options, so 'grep --version' on line 3169 fails. Then in the default case, the test "grep -e 'GREP$' -e '-(cannot match)-' ..." on line 3208 doesn't match. I found that my older version of grep appears to /AND/ all of the '-e' expressions where newer versions of grep /OR/ the '-e' expressions. I searched through the script and it doesn't appear to me that the behavior described above is utilized anywhere else. As a hack I changed line 3169 to "grep -V" and the configure script completed successfully. Also, I have installed openSSH 4.3p2 previously on this same platform and I didn't run into this issue.
This appears to be something that autoconf 2.60 (which 4.4p1 uses) does that 2.59 (which 4.3x used) doesn't rather than a change in OpenSSH's configure.ac. I'm not sure if there's anything configure.ac can do about this, though.
I have just switched snapshots from autoconf-2.60 to autoconf-2.61. Please try a snapshot dated 20070123 or later and let us know if the problem persists.
This has been a while and we've not heard anything, so I am closing this bug. Please reopen if the current versions don't work (although I'm not sure there's a lot we can do about it other than bother the autoconf folks).
BTW the snapshots can be found here: http://www.mindrot.org/openssh_snap/
Mass update RESOLVED->CLOSED after release of openssh-5.1