can I reinstall make?

[Roger Merritt]

I think the 'make' program on one of my machines (running FreeBSD 4.10) has 
gotten farkled. I made the mistake of running 'portupgrade -a' and now the 
whole system is a mess -- among other things it uninstalled  my 'perl 
5.8.5'. Actually, it uninstalled a lot of things and then quit on an error 
without reinstalling them. Luckily none of the things are things I use 
every day.

When I ran 'portversion -c > needs.update' it told me I needed to upgrade 
both 'autoconf' and 'automake', so I switched to /usr/ports and ran:

root at kepler:/usr/ports# make search name="autoconf"
Missing }.
root at kepler:/usr/ports# make search name="automake"
Missing }.
root at kepler:/usr/ports# cd devel/autoconf253
root at kepler:/usr/ports/devel/autoconf253# make install clean
Missing }.
root at kepler:/usr/ports/devel/autoconf253# cd ../../lang/perl5.8
root at kepler:/usr/ports/lang/perl5.8# make deinstall
Missing }.

This doesn't look good. At the moment the machine is still fulfilling its 
main function as a gateway to the Internet for the Windows machines in our 
student computer lab, but I fear for the future. How can I be sure the 
problem is really with 'make' and how can I fix the problem if it is?

-- 
Roger