using awk with records that have over 100 fields

[John Lacey]

alex at am.sublink.org (Alex Martelli) writes:

>I know I don't speak for all Unix-lovers, but I wouldn't use awk, ksh,
>icon, and so on, so willingly, if each did not have a good-to-great
>book about it.  Great-to-good books ain't all (I *do* use dmake, and
>*don't* use ratfor, for example...) - but they surely DO help!

Ditto here.  In fact, I find that when a program comes with _any_
documentation, it is better than programs that come with none.  And
better documentation seems to be a good indicator of a better program.
These are generalizations, of course, broken from time to time.  My
favorite examples are TeX (ahh, bliss) and AWK.  The best
counter-example I know is Microsoft Word for the Macintosh, which has
well above average documentation ....
-- 
John Lacey         614 436 3773         73730,2250
john at basho.uucp  or  basho!john at cis.ohio-state.edu