Re: Geez - is Solaris /usr/bin/awk brain dead or what?

From: Brian Inglis (Brian.Inglis_at_SystematicSW.Invalid)
Date: 09/11/04 

Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 06:11:27 GMT

On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 23:47:16 GMT in comp.lang.awk,
gazelle@yin.interaccess.com (Kenny McCormack) wrote:

>In article <rbd4k058fj1ur6un8srvgsi99m4llhfvqt@4ax.com>,
>Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis@SystematicSW.ab.ca> wrote:

>>>Still, any idea why the program doesn't work under /usr/bin/awk?
>>
>>The program awk on Solaris is pre-AWK-book awk, not supporting user
>>functions, or all the usual builtin functions, operators, etc.
>
>Right - everybody knows that.
>But the man page ("man awk" on the instant Solaris system) says:

What does man nawk say?

>(Irrelevant nonsense about the versions in /bin/nawk and /usr/xpg4/bin/awk,
>/opt/bin/gawk, /usr/local/bin/tawk, etc, etc - snipped)

It's neither irrelevant nor nonsense: /usr/xpg4/bin/awk is the
standard Unix awk and may invoke the same binary as nawk; this is
implied by the Solaris awk man page which says:
"
     /usr/xpg4/bin/awk [ -F ERE ] [ -v assignment ... ]
          'program' | -f progfile ... [ argument ... ]

DESCRIPTION
     The /usr/xpg4/bin/awk utility is described on the nawk(1)
     manual page.
"
What Solaris ships as /usr/bin/awk is probably the original Seventh
Edition version that nobody else has shipped or used for decades; but
gawk supports the original semantics with the --traditional option,
which you might want to test on your old script.
You could also do a "find / -name '*awk' -ls" to compare the dates,
times, sizes, and links of all the awk versions on the system. 

-- 
Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis 	Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Brian.Inglis@CSi.com 	(Brian[dot]Inglis{at}SystematicSW[dot]ab[dot]ca)
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