Please educate me

[Medland, Bill]

Can anyone explain what is going on here please; this is obviously an area
of bash etc I don't understand.

This morning I was doing a fresh install on a totally clean machine from the
Wine-20020411 tarball under Redhat 7.1.

All went reasonable well until I saw a "..<something not write> .." go
flashing past as I ran wineinstall and later on the regapi failed because it
couldn't find libntdll.dll.so.  OK so I guess it was the ldconfig that
failed!!

So I thought "lets fix it".  Yes; in the last fix to wineinstall where we
went with using "su root" instead the ldconfig was hard-coded (and wasn't on
the path for simply "su root").  So I followed up on the machine I normally
use and started messing about with $ac_cv_path_LDCONFIG.  I got that
working, consistant on hand-editing the config.cache to change "true" to
"/sbin/ldconfig".

So the remaining thing was to get the cache entry generated correctly.  This
is where the problem is.  (I still don't understand why it should get set
either to the name of an executable or to the value "true"; I dislike
variables holding dissimilar types).  Anyway I was watching the loop so see
why it wasn't finding the /sbin/ldconfig and I noticed that 

for ac_dir in /sbin:/usr/sbin:$PATH

was splitting as 
1. /sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin
2. /bin
3. /usr/bin
etc.

Now, I know I can force it to work by changing the for loop to 
for ac_dir in /sbin /usr/sbin $PATH

However the original form used to work (I guess, since the cache is correct
on my other machine) so I'd rather know why it isn't working currently and
fix that

Can anyone explain why it isn't splitting the for the way we want it to

TIA

Bill