On my systems without perl, PERL is set to something like
${SHELL} '/usr/src/coreutils-9.0/build-aux/missing' perl
which causes condition at line 70 in configure.ac to fail, resulting in
incorrect detection of perl and subsequent build failure. Suggested fix:
diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac
index 9b8ea0dde..f6a7a6917 100644
--- a/configure.ac
+++ b/configure.ac
@@ -67,7 +67,7 @@ coreutils_MACROS
# FIXME: this is suboptimal. Ideally, we would be able to call gl_PERL
# with an ACTION-IF-NOT-FOUND argument ...
cu_have_perl=yes
-case $PERL in *"/missing "*) cu_have_perl=no;; esac
+case $PERL in */missing*) cu_have_perl=no;; esac
AM_CONDITIONAL([HAVE_PERL], [test $cu_have_perl = yes])
# gl_GCC_VERSION_IFELSE([major], [minor], [run-if-found], [run-if-not-found])
