make installkernel help required. (ANSWER... sort of)

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2004-09-22 11:19, Phil Payne <phil at sal-n-phil.net> wrote:
> After having another search of the archives and seeing someone suggest
> they were having make problems in X:
> (http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/htdig/freebsd-questions/2004-September/058300.html)
>
> ... I ran the make installkernel outside of X (i.e. in a console) and it
> works fine.
>
> Try to run it in aterm or xterm and you get the "can't shift that many"
> error.
>
> I cannot pretend to know anything about why this is the case.

This error seems to be caused by some sort of mishandling of nls.alias
when this command runs:

: cd /usr/share/nls;  set - `grep "^[a-zA-Z]" /usr/src/etc/nls.alias`;
: while [ $# -gt 0 ] ;  do  rm -rf "$1";  ln -s "$2" "$1";  shift; shift;
: done
: shift: can't shift that many
: *** Error code 2
:
: Stop in /usr/src/etc.

For this to work correctly, the file /usr/src/etc/nls.alias should
contain pairs of words, as shown below:

: # $FreeBSD: src/etc/nls.alias,v 1.5 2003/06/10 01:22:30 ache Exp $
:
: POSIX                   C
: en_US.US-ASCII          C

Two questions that come to my mind are:

        1. Have you changed this file in any way?

        2. What are the locale settings of your environment when this
           fails, i.e. what does this print?

                $ env | grep '^L[AC]' | sort

- Giorgos