awk Question

[Norman Joseph]

In <3384 at linus.SLCS.SLB.COM>, by oneill at getafix.slcs.slb.com (Dennis O'Neill):
> 
> [writing about parsing multi-line records with awk, and getting a
>  syntax error on a line using the gsub() function call:]
>
> {gsub(/\\\\/, "");  print $0}
> 
> [generates:]
> 
> awk: syntax error near line 1
> awk: illegal statement near line 1


On my system (Altos running Unix 5.3.1) there are
two versions of awk, namely "awk" and "nawk" (new awk).
Apparently nawk is the latest version of awk as described
in the book _The_AWK_Programming_Language_ by Aho,
Kernighan, & Weinberger, and includes gsub() as a builtin
function, while plain old awk does not.  My suspicion is
that you are using the old awk.


-- 
Norm Joseph - Oglevee Computer System, Inc.
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