[illumos-Developer] awk, nawk, oawk, ...

[Garrett D'Amore]

  On 04/ 5/11 08:51 AM, Roland Mainz wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 5:42 PM, Gordon Ross<gordon.w.ross at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> I've just run into another (porting) case where "awk" just won't do,
>> and wish "awk" pointed to "nawk" and "awk" would either go away or
>> become "oawk" or something.
>> Does anything stand in the way of our making "nawk" the new "awk"?
> Erm... if you do please move /usr/xpg4/bin/awk to /usr/bin/awk and
> _not_ the nawk codebase (the idea is to get a fully POSIX-conformant
> "awk" implementation as /usr/bin/awk. nawk is close but not perfect
> and AFAIK all nawk-specific scripts should run with the current
> /usr/xpg4/bin/awk (Olga Kryzhanovska could explain the differences but
> she's not back again)).

Both xpg4/awk and nawk apparently have deficiencies, such that either 
one of them would require work to be able to replace the other.

Admittedly, I think we ought to be able to consolidate on a single awk 
implementation... There is oawk, awk, nawk, xpg4/awk, and ... gawk.  
This is crazy.

     - Garrett

> ----
>
> Bye,
> Roland
>