Thank you Alan. This did the trick. I suspect my userland got out of 
sync with the kernel somehow, leading to install-info being interpreted 
as a shell script. I may have accidentally built and installed the 1.6W 
kernel without building the userland. But when I saw this problem I 
reverted to the 1.6U kernel and saw the same problem.

Anyway, it works now: thanks again.

Louis

Alan Barrett wrote:

> On Thu, 21 Aug 2003, Louis  Guillaume wrote:
> 
>>install-info --info-dir=/usr/src/obj/tooldir.NetBSD-1.6U-i386/info 
>>/usr/src/obj/tooldir.NetBSD-1.6U-i386/info/groff
>>install-info: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
>>*** Error code 2
>>
>>
>>Any idea what might be going on?
> 
> 
> One bug is that the build should invoke
> ${TOOLDIR}/bin/nbinstall-info instead of just install-info.  Try the
> appended patch to fix that.
> 
> It also looks as though whatever install-info happens to be in your PATH
> is of a type not supported by your kernel, so the shell tries to run it
> as a shell script, and that fails.
> 
> Here's what I see when I force a shell to interpret install-info as a
> shell script:
> 
> $ type install-info
> install-info is /usr/bin/install-info
> $ sh /usr/bin/install-info
> /usr/bin/install-info: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
> 
> --apb (Alan Barrett)
> 
> Index: tools/groff/Makefile
> --- tools/groff/Makefile	18 Jul 2003 08:26:13 -0000	1.23
> +++ tools/groff/Makefile	21 Aug 2003 10:07:15 -0000
> @@ -3,7 +3,8 @@
>  MODULE=		groff
>  
>  ALL_TARGET=	src/include all
> -MAKE_ARGS=	bindir=${TOOLDIR}/lib/groff MAKEINFO=${TOOL_MAKEINFO:Q}
> +MAKE_ARGS=	bindir=${TOOLDIR}/lib/groff MAKEINFO=${TOOL_MAKEINFO:Q} \
> +		INSTALL_INFO=${TOOL_INSTALL_INFO:Q}
>  
>  TMACDIR=	${TOOLDIR}/share/groff/tmac
>  SITETMACDIR=	${TOOLDIR}/share/groff/site-tmac