On Sun, 30 May 1999, Julian Gilbey wrote: > > I do not withdraw the bug: If every awk in the system is already a "new > > awk", why do we need /usr/bin/nawk at all?, we could use always > > /usr/bin/awk and it would always work. > > > > Is there a rationale somewhere? > > > > Maybe we should check what does POSIX say about /usr/bin/awk (does it > > have to be a new awk?) and act accordingly. > > Well, the mawk manpage seems to suggest that POSIX defines an > extension of new awk. The UNIX98 description seems to make no > comments about the relation between its specs of awk and the AWK > book. What are the differences between the old and new awks? Maybe > we could check them out -- should be very easy.
Among other things: Old awk is not guaranteed to have user-defined functions (if I'm not mistaken). However, I have yet to see an awk packaged for Debian which is not a new awk. -- "cc0c965082037349597e24ec8103a1c2" (a truly random sig)
