Configure libevent failed:./configure: line 19401: cannot create temp file for here-document: No such file or directory

Question

I was going to install libevent on CentOS 7. So I went to https://libevent.org/ to download the newest version of libevent(libevent-2.1.12-stable.tar.gz). The operations were:

mkdir -r /opt/libevent
cd /opt/libevent
tar -zxvf libevent-2.1.12-stable.tar.gz
cd libevent-2.1.12-stable
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/libevent
make
make install

When I run ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/libevent, it gave some errors below:

checking that generated files are newer than configure... done
configure: creating ./config.status
./configure: line 19401: cannot create temp file for here-document: No such file or directory
configure: error: write failure creating ./config.status

And line 19401 of configure is:

cat >>$CONFIG_STATUS <<_ACEOF || ac_write_fail=1

The value of $CONFIG_STATUS was empty:

[root@centos libevent-2.1.12-stable]# echo $CONFIG_STATUS

[root@centos libevent-2.1.12-stable]#

Does anybody know how to solve it?