Date: Fri, 24 Dec 2010 11:25:33 +0000 From: Alexander Best <arundel@freebsd.org> To: Bruce Cran <bruce@cran.org.uk> Cc: freebsd-bugs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: bin/143367: [patch] awk(1) treats -Ft as -F <tab> Message-ID: <20101224112533.GA98482@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <20101211200134.00005be8@unknown> References: <201012111957.oBBJvDhb050636@freefall.freebsd.org> <20101211200134.00005be8@unknown>
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On Sat Dec 11 10, Bruce Cran wrote:
> [replying privately since you've reassigned the PR]
>
> On Sat, 11 Dec 2010 19:57:13 GMT
> arundel@FreeBSD.org wrote:
>
> > Back into the pool, since i was not able to contact Brian Kernighan.
>
> Did you try bwk@cs.princeton.edu ? Wikipedia claims he's currently
> working at Princeton.
i was able to contact him using the email address you recommended.
the problem seems to be that according to bwk the behavior documented in this
PR was initially a feature and not a bug. so changing the semantics would break
historical behavior. i'll send another status update on this issue once bwk
decides which path he wants to follow:
1) changing awk's semantics or
2) mentioning this behavior in the awk(1) manual (BUGS section).
please also note that
awk -Ft '{ print $1, $2 }'
and
awk '{ FS="t" } { print $1, $2 }'
behave differently. the latter example interprets the "t" as regular character.
so there's also the issue of inconsistency.
cheers.
alex
>
> --
> Bruce Cran
--
a13x
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