I see, and appreciate your input; as a novice myself I welcome and encourage criticism and instruction from others who know their stuff.

My comment was an inference based on the fact that certain alternative methods of checking for the presence of text in a string var worked in LXTerminal, but not in the lower runlevel root terminal at startup. Why is this the case?

I noticed that the shebang-line in /etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig invokes #!/bin/busybox sh. Does knoppix.sh therefore run in Busybox/Almquist shell, rather than Bash or sh?