Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2018 20:41:03 +0000 From: bugzilla-noreply@freebsd.org To: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org Subject: [Bug 226112] awk(1) man page unclear about field separator, FS Message-ID: <bug-226112-9-Yq4e8ngwly@https.bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/> In-Reply-To: <bug-226112-9@https.bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/> References: <bug-226112-9@https.bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/>
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https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3D226112 Jamie Landeg-Jones <jamie@catflap.org> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |jamie@catflap.org --- Comment #2 from Jamie Landeg-Jones <jamie@catflap.org> --- Hi. Thanks for the reply. I'll explain how I got here: I wanted to do a quick hack to split a line at every character, and at that point, I was not familiar with "awk" allowing a null character to do the jo= b. Hence, believing the strings was a regular expression, I set FS to "." whic= h - contrary to the manual - was taken as a literal, not a RE! Indeed, in your description of the atom from re_format, you missed out: "or a single character with no other significance (matching that character)= ." As in your examples: You used examples where a single character is already a literal character in RE, which isn't always the case: % printf 'hello(world' | egrep '(' egrep: Unmatched ( or \( % printf 'hello(world' | awk -F '(' '{print $1}' hello I know this is hardly a major error, but it is still inaccurate - especiall= y in the case of "."! Just for info, the actual text from gawk (which probably phrases it better = than I did!) is: "If FS is a single character, fields are separated by that character. If F= S is the null string, then each individual character becomes a separate field.=20 Otherwise, FS is expected to be a full regular expression." Cheers, Jamie --=20 You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.=
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