Possible bug in awk?
William L. Sebok
wls at astrovax.UUCP
Wed Apr 10 02:58:31 AEST 1985
> I have been trying to do some stuff with awk that I saw in an
> example in one of the Unix books and it doesn't work as I thought.
> It seems to me that the line:
>
> echo "This is a test" | awk {$1 = "Foo"; print}
>
> should print out "Foo is a test" but all I get when I try it is the
> original line.
> Is this a bug in awk?
I get "Foo is a test". However I had to put single quotes around the argument
to awk to protect them from the shell (either sh or csh). Could that be part
of the problem?
I also vaguly remember long ago installing a 4.2 BSD awk bugfix from Bill
Shannon of Sun that had something to do with fixing the behavior of assigment
to positional parameters.
--
Bill Sebok Princeton University, Astrophysics
{allegra,akgua,burl,cbosgd,decvax,ihnp4,noao,princeton,vax135}!astrovax!wls
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