I found that in bb-hosts you can not indent "include" lines. IE the lines can't start with white space. I found that in lib/stackio.c the buffer was not getting "sanitize"d: Index: lib/stackio.c =================================================================== --- lib/stackio.c (revision 6223) +++ lib/stackio.c (working copy) @@ -408,6 +408,7 @@ result = unlimfgets(buffer, fdhead->fd); if (result) { + sanitize_input(buffer, 0, 0); if ( (strncmp(STRBUF(buffer), "include ", 8) == 0) || (extraincl && (strncmp(STRBUF(buffer), extraincl, strlen(extraincl)) == 0)) ) { char *newfn, *eol;