Pipes inside backticks fail under MinGW - bash

Question

When I try to run some Bash scripts on a Windows XP machine using MinGW, I get the following error:
./autogen.sh: pipe error: No such file or directory
I have localised the problem to Bash lines such as the following, which have a pipe inside backticks:
__copyright="`grep Copyright ./autogen.sh | head -1`"
However, pipes not inside backticks work just fine:
grep Copyright ./autogen.sh | head -1
All the programs you expect (sh, head, grep) are available and run happily on the command line and in Bash.
What should I do to resolve this error? I cannot run most Bash build tools without it.

Answer 1

$ msysinfo | head -3
msysinfo-1.3: Send this to the MSYS support list:
MSYS 1.0.11(0.46/3/2) 2004-04-30 18:55 i686 unknown; targ=MINGW32
$ echo '__copyright="`grep Copyright ./autogen.sh | head -1`" && echo $__copyright' >test.sh
$ cat test.sh
__copyright="`grep Copyright ./autogen.sh | head -1`" && echo $__copyright
$ sh test.sh
# Copyright 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 by
For this test, I copied autogen.sh from some place like... randomly... http://svn.ghostscript.com/ghostscript/tags/freetype-2.3.7/autogen.sh
Probably this means your question needs more information.
But... sometimes when I run into snarly scenarios, it can help to enclose the breaking code in ( ). Technically, also, you do not need " " around backticks, and that complicates some use, but your example does not seem problematic.
I really hate to propose the following as it seems completely unnecessary:
$ for item in `grep Copyright ./autogen.sh`;
do
__copyright="$__copyright $item";
done;
echo $__copyright
What is more weird is that your error message seems to imply autogen.sh itself generated the error as though autogen.sh was grepping itself so I did:
$ sh test.sh
__copyright="`grep Copyright ./test.sh | head -1`" && echo $__copyright
after modifying test.sh to grep itself, and even that worked.
It therefore sounds like a sequencing issue and not a backtick issue, you know, which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Is autogen.sh trying to read its own Copyright comment? One way to let comments serve as data is to wrap them in here documents:
_Copyright ()
{
cat <<-END_OF_TEXT
# Copyright 2012, me
END_OF_TEXT
}
_Copyright