Some of the compat code in GNU tooling is pretty wild:
# Add our own library path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH
LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/builddir/guile-3.0.10/build/libguile/.libs:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
# Some systems cannot cope with colon-terminated LD_LIBRARY_PATH
# The second colon is a workaround for a bug in BeOS R4 sed
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`$ECHO "$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" | /usr/bin/sed 's/::*$//'`
BeOS R4 came out in 1998, and BeOS has been dead for 25 years.