diff --git a/CHANGES b/CHANGES
index bdac7b113..3bd22a540 100644
--- a/CHANGES
+++ b/CHANGES
@@ -6,6 +6,11 @@
 
                                   Changelog
 
+Daniel (9 December 2004)
+- Bryan Henderson pointed out in bug report #1081788 that the curl-config
+  --vernum output wasn't zero prefixed properly (as claimed in documentation).
+  This is fixed in maketgz now.
+  
 Daniel (8 December 2004)
 - Rene Bernhardt found and fixed a buffer overrun in the NTLM code, where
   libcurl always and unconditionally overwrote a stack-based array with 3 zero
diff --git a/maketgz b/maketgz
index ed415c6dd..4941f8833 100755
--- a/maketgz
+++ b/maketgz
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ major=`echo $libversion |cut -d. -f1 | sed -e "s/[^0-9]//g"`
 minor=`echo $libversion |cut -d. -f2 | sed -e "s/[^0-9]//g"`
 patch=`echo $libversion |cut -d. -f3 | cut -d- -f1 | sed -e "s/[^0-9]//g"`
 
-numeric=`echo "obase=16; $major*256*256 + $minor*256 + $patch" | bc`
+numeric=`perl -e 'printf("%02x%02x%02x\n", '"$major, $minor, $patch);"`
 
 HEADER=include/curl/curlver.h
 CHEADER=src/version.h