awk problem

[john.urban]

In article <1991Apr23.104858.26935 at cbnews.cb.att.com> reo at cbnews.cb.att.com (robert.e.o'brien) writes:
>This is embarrassingly simple, but I can't figure it out.  The awk book 
>by the Aho, Kernigan, and Weinberger have info about piping in input
>using the getline function.
>
>When I try (see p. 62 of book which has "date" | getline d):
>
>{ "date" | getline d 
>print d }
>
>I get:
>
>awk: syntax error near line 1
>awk: illegal statement near line 1
>
>I've tried a number of variations on this.  What am I doing wrong?
>Thanks in advance.
>

Under UNIX System V/386 Release 3.2 (and Release 4.0) there are two versions of
awk.  Plain old awk and nawk.  Nawk is new awk.  nawk supports alot of things
that awk does not (e.g. system("cmd") and your example above.

Type in:

$ type nawk

If you got nawk, then your run program on that.  On my machine, your program
ran fine with nawk and died with awk.

Sincerely,

John Urban