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

[Guido Berhoerster]

* Roland Mainz <roland.mainz at nrubsig.org> [2011-04-05 17:52]:
> 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)).

One significant difference is that nawk/one-true-awk does not
have complete ERE support as mandated by POSIX.
-- 
Guido Berhoerster