Hi Ron,
I do have a plain automake linking to automake-1.9 -> works. I also have a automake-1.10 binary. To test it I removed the empty "" from the loop and, voila, it worked. Now back to your problem...
I guess what happened here is: The for-loop tested 1.10 first. The awk-version-check failed here, so the for loop continued with the next iteration, testing 1.9. This time the version check worked. So you were using 1.9 again. No. It used automake-1.10. Did you ever try the respective line by hand?
The awk line? Yes, I tried that manually. But wait ... I just tried again and I guess you found the problem: This is on erwin: mroi@erwin:~ > awk --version | head -n 1 GNU Awk 3.1.4 mroi@erwin:~ > awk 'NR==1 { if( $(NF) >= 1.9) print "OK"; else print "not OK"; }' <<< 1.10 OK This is on my Mac OS X: michael@carpo:~ > awk --version | head -n 1 GNU Awk 3.1.2 michael@carpo:~ > awk 'NR==1 { if( $(NF) >= 1.9) print "OK"; else print "not OK"; }' <<< 1.10 not OK Newer versions of awk seem to compare more elaborately, not with a simple string compare. What an awk-ward problem. Michael