HPUX awk has bugs. I recommend that you use Brian Kernighan's implementation of awk, which is available for free from AT&T. Try http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/bwk/. If you must use HPUX awk, Steven Ooms kindly provided the following changes to the awk script "totex". The problem lines are all situated in the function "indexlabel( ident, l )": ---------------start included text--------------- totex: gsub(/{/, ":lb", l) # left brace ... totex: gsub(/{/, "{\\char123}", arg) ... totex: gsub(/{\\char92>/, "{\\char92}", arg) ---------------end included text--------------- The corresponding new lines look as follows: ---------------start included text--------------- totex: gsub(/\{/, ":lb", l) # left brace ... totex: gsub(/\{/, "{\\char123}", arg) ... totex: gsub(/\{\\char92>/, "{\\char92}", arg) ---------------end included text--------------- Also, I'm told that in src/Makefile the strip command in an HPUX8 machine causes the make to fail. Commenting out the 'strip' fixes the problem.