Autotools and its generated scripts depend on stdin

[Kevin O'Gorman]

Running a fresh install of Xubuntu 12.04.1, up-to-date as of yesterday.
I'm following instructions in an online tutorial at http://fsmsh.com/2755
With a tiny project (tar attached) and smallest possible configure.ac, running 'autoreconf' as instructed never completes. However, if I run it with stdin redirected from /dev/null, it finishes in 2.6 seconds.

Something very similar happens later with the scripts that get generated, except that they work fine if I run them under bash instead of sh (of course they're the same program).

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: autoconf 2.68-1ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-31.50-generic-pae 3.2.28
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-31-generic-pae i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu15
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat Dec 1 09:29:22 2012
InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 12.04.1 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release i386 (20120817.3)
MarkForUpload: True
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: autoconf
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)