> I have made some changes to the /sbin/ifconfig and
> /sbin/route sources and replaced the binaries.
> 
> Now when I reboot, I get these synatx errors at
> startup:
> 
> ifconfig: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected

> However if I do a manual "dhclient" after booting up,
> dhclient works fine. route and the ifconfig commands
> work just fine after the bootup.

> Any ideas on what is casuing the "syntax" errors?

An exec() of these files failed, so the shell is falling back to
interpreting the file contents as if they were a shell script.

speculation:

I'm not sure what might cause these exact symptoms; one (off the wall)
guess is that you didn't statically link the new binaries.  Everything
in src/sbin/* is statically linked due to a directive in
src/sbin/Makefile.inc; if you just checked out route and ifconfig and
not sbin/Makefile.inc you'll miss the LDSTATIC?= -static declaration.

					- Bill