No actually, this is a toy build I'm using to play. In fact the source is not that of an actual release... It's a post 0.9.2 clone and carries a warning.
I thought I might be making an obvious bash mistake. I should note that if I were to do
echo $priv
literally copy the resulting string and verbosely do
bitcoind importprivkey ""
At least there isn't an error message. But I'm not home now and can't recall if that totally worked or not.