At least it does for me on v5.1 It is a result of a bug in sh on OSF1. "$var"? doesn't do file-globbing if $var contains a / (it does if it doesn't). This causes a touch command in teh merge test to fail. WORKAROUND: Set BIN_SH=xpg4 in your environment while running the test. This causes the POSIX version of sh to be used (see man sh on OSF1).