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Old 20th January 2010
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Default All awk's on Solaris are broken!

Here is an interesting message from comp.lang.awk list that explains why all awk's that come with Solaris are "no good".
Quote:
...
Actually *ALL* awk implementations shipped with Solaris are broken :-/

cheusov@solaris>
0 cheusov>/usr/xpg4/bin/awk '$0 ~ /=/'
/usr/xpg4/bin/awk: syntax error Context is:
>>> $0 ~ /= <<<

1 cheusov>/usr/bin/nawk '$0 ~ /=/'
/usr/bin/nawk: syntax error at source line 1
context is
$0 ~ >>> /= <<<
/usr/bin/nawk: bailing out at source line 1

2 cheusov>/usr/bin/awk '$0 ~ /=/'
awk: syntax error near line 1
awk: bailing out near line 1

2 cheusov>uname -a
SunOS solaris 5.10 Generic_125100-08 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10

0 cheusov>

This is just one bug, there are others.

P.S.
"The One True AWK" by Brian Kernigan has also lots of problems.
Lots of them were sucessfully fixed in NetBSD.

- fixed: serious bug with regular expression, PR/33392
- fixed: support for multibyte charsets in tolower/toupper functions,
PR/36394
- fixed: there is a hardcoded limit on a number of open files, PR/37205
- fixed: incorrect handling of \ at the end of line in awk script, PR/37212
- fixed: incorrect matching of [:cntrl:], PR/38737
- fixed: warning about non-portable escape sequences, PR/39002
- fixed: free(): warning: junk pointer, too low to make sense, PR/39132
- fixed: -Ft is broken, PR/39133
- fixed: segfaults when "nextfile" is in BEGIN {...}, bin/39134
- fixed: nawk doesn't handle RS as a RE but as a single character, PR/30294
- fixed: awk(1) crash with RE and ^ anchor, PR/40689

Others are not fixed:
- Bizarre behavior in awk with invalid numeric constants, PR/42463
- LC_NUMERIC in awk is not POSIX compliant, PR/42320
- NetBSD awk/nawk concatenation op. is slower than that of GNU awk, PR/39759
- /usr/bin/awk: formatting issues in printf, PR/39135
- regexps should treat { and } as {n,m}, but as regular
characters, PR/38127

I sent all this to Brian, but he ignored all these issues and fixes.
...
http://groups.google.com/group/comp....f188c46ee45910

Author of message is Aleksey Cheusov, creator of RUNAWK wrapper utility for awk.

Warning for all using awk on Solaris!
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If you play hard enough, you'll break something for sure, and having to fix a badly broken system is arguably the fastest way of all to learn. -Michael Lucas, AbsoluteBSD
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