awk vs. regular expressions starting with equal sign

[Robert Reed]

> There is a fundamental lexical ambiguity in awk:  when you see "/=",
> is this the divide-by-and-assign operator, or the start of a regular
> expression which happens to begin with an equal sign? 
>
> 				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
> 				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry

You can easily get around it by escaping it, such as

	awk '/\= / {...}' ...

I tried this on our 4.2BSD system and it seems to work just fine.

-- 
Robert Reed, Logic Design Systems Division, tektronix!teklds!bobr