Building hotspot on certain systems results in a series of:
expr: syntax error
expr: syntax error
expr: syntax error
expr: syntax error

Volker Simonis provided the following analysis and suggested fix:

It is caused by a peculiarity of the gcc version on Ubuntu where "gcc
-dumpversion" doesn't print a micro-version:

Ubuntu:
$ gcc -dumpversion
4.6

Any other Linux:
$ gcc -dumpversion
4.8.3

This "feature" is tracked under
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gcc-4.8/+bug/1360404 and has
been fixed for gcc 4.9 but won't be fixed for older versions of gcc.

In hotspot/make/linux/makefiles/gcc.make we parse the micro-version of
gcc and use it in the following way:

CC_VER_MICRO := $(shell $(CC) -dumpversion | sed 's/egcs-//' | cut -d'.' -f3)

ifeq ($(shell expr $(CC_VER_MAJOR) = 4 \& $(CC_VER_MINOR) = 1 \&
$(CC_VER_MICRO) = 1), 1)
  $(error "GCC $(CC_VER_MAJOR).$(CC_VER_MINOR).$(CC_VER_MICRO) not
supported because of
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=27724")
endif

The shell expression results in a syntax error if $(CC_VER_MICRO)
because it expaands to something like "expr 4 = 4 & 3 = 1 & = 1"

I haven't fixed it until now because it does no harm. The
corresponding check is for gcc 4.1.1 but the affected Ubuntu gcc
compilers are 4.6, 4.7 and 4.8.

A trivial fix would be to set CC_VER_MICRO to "0" by default.