Perl missing separator - FAQ entry isn't there (update)

[John Gnew]

Sharif Oerton wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:47:13 Sharif Oerton wrote:
>   
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm a bit further along this time, but
>>
>> make
>>
>> for Perl is failing, saying
>>
>> makefile:954: *** missing separator. Stop.
>>
>> I searched the mailing list archives, and most of the replies reference a
>> FAQ entry that now seems to not exist. One reply suggested to check for the
>> existence of /dev/null (or so I interpreted it) -
>>
>> ls /dev | grep null
>>
>> outputs
>>
>> null
>>
>> so the file is definitely there. Same for /dev/zero.
>>
>> Googling results in a forum post referencing the running of "MAKEDEV", but
>> I can't remember reading anything about MAKEDEV previously - is it only
>> used in older versions of LFS?
>>
>> My configuration command was
>>
>> ./configure.gnu --prefix=/usr -Dman1dir=/usr/share/man/man1
>> -Dman3dir=/usr/share/man/man3 -Dpager="/usr/bin/less -isR"
>>
>> Does anyone have any hints?
>>
>> Thanks a lot.
>>
>> Sharif
>>     
>
> Okay, I decided to have a look at the makefile and see if there was anything 
> obviously wrong, and I found that the makefile only has 953 lines - there's 
> no line 954, not even a newline character. Hopefully that will mean something 
> to someone. 
>
> Thanks,
> Sharif
>   

I had the missing separator problem. It turned out to be my /dev/null 
file was not setup correctly.

Issue the following to test it.

test -c /dev/null && echo Ok
Ok
 If you do not get "OK" back, then something is wrong with /dev/null