head -1 and tail -1 no longer work with the latest coreutils with glibc-2.3.2-r2 or above. see Bugzilla Bug 25212 I addressed this on your behalf in 1.0 after it was brought to my attention by another gdev but it looks like the code got reverted back to an older revision. Seems ChangeLog entry #2 got completely ignored
/home/cvsroot/gentoo-x86/sys-devel/hardened-gcc/hardened-gcc-1.3.ebuild,v <-- hardened-gcc-1.3.ebuild new revision: 1.2; previous revision: 1.1 changed head -1 to head -n 1 thanks to solar for pointing this out