On Mon, Apr 21, 2025 at 08:39:18AM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote: >... > original-awk's man page admits to one area of POSIX-nonconformance: > > BUGS > ... > POSIX‐standard interval expressions in regular expressions are not > supported. > > ...which I think weakens the case for your proposal helping us to have > AWK scripts that don't exercise extensions to POSIX. (But maybe the > newer original-awk that supports CSV data--a non-POSIX extension--fixes > that.) > > I wonder if it'd be less effort to _review_ what AWK scripts we have > in maintainer scripts for satisfiability by any POSIX-conforming AWK. > How many can there be? </Jeremy Clarkson>
POSIX doesn't matter here, awk has is a virtual essential package and having original-awk installed as sole implementation has been supported for decades. Like with most essential tools the subset of functionality that is used by the vast majority of users is pretty small, and often not well aligned with what is in POSIX. The few packages that are not happy with original-awk already use mawk or gawk explicitly. It is possible that more awk usage that doesn't work with original-awk is found when changing the default, but I would be surprised if this would uncover a large number of bugs. > Regards, > Branden >... cu Adrian
