Am 30.05.2012 02:11, schrieb Christoph Junghans: > Hi, > > recently I stumbled across a problem with mawk, which is apprearly > Ubuntu's default awk interpreter. > This brought the idea to my mind of adding a virtual for awk. Beside > the fact that we already have 3 awk interpreters in gx86 (gawk, mawk > and busybox awk), there are other ones like nawk and awka. > > I had some discussions with spanKY on that topic in bug #415689, which > summarizes in the following: > > Advantages: > - mawk is faster - useful for scientific purposes > - busybox awk could replace gawk on minimal systems > - more POSIX conform systems > > Disadvantages: > - some awk code in the tree and portage is probably using GNU > extensions without executing gawk explicitly > - gray zone of Posix 1003.2 (e.g. substr() function and an index of 0) > [...] > > I have tested mawk as default interpreter for a while on my x86 boxes > and didn't observed any problems so far. > > Cheers, > > Christoph >
An easy easy way to crash mawk is opening many different files.
mkdir -p mkdir /tmp/foo; find "$HOME" -type f -printf '%f %s\n' | \
gawk '{ print $2 > "/tmp/foo/" $1 }'
--> Fills /tmp/foo with small files
mkdir -p mkdir /tmp/foo; find "$HOME" -type f -printf '%f %s\n' | \
mawk '{ print $2 > "/tmp/foo/" $1 }'
--> Crashes with error 'mawk: cannot open "/tmp/foo/7B090d01" for output
(Too many open files)'
Probably not the cleverest approach to this but just a reminder that
there are still subtle differences.
That being said, +1 for giving the choice.
Regards,
Florian Philipp
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