in debian, awk is mawk not gawk
Back when I used some other leading brand of GNu/Linux, boys were
boys, girls were girls, and awk was gawk. Now switching to the
debian world, awk is mawk. I'm worried that the scripts that I've
been writing for years and years will break. So I installed gawk.
However unlike when one installs postfix, and exim gets kicked out,
mawk is unphased and still what one gets if one types "awk".
It seems I would have to got to /etc/alternatives and rip it up and
point it over by hand. But I bet then all kinds of system scripts
will break. Hmmm, I probably will just make a pointer in my ~/bin
... grumble.
Say, it seems that mawk is froze in 1996. Being that debian is
supposed to be the most GNU/Linux of all the Linuxes, it would seem
odd that the other leading brand distributions feature gawk for awk
whilst on debian ... well, unless one chooses the 'optional' gawk
package, awk is lize froze ...
Ok, if we are going to play that way then why not a very conservative
/bin/sh from version 7 unix instead of the peppy bash incarnation?
which mawk gawk|xargs wc -c
95004 /usr/bin/mawk
218232 /usr/bin/gawk
OK, so "it's twice as big". Anyway, 1/6000 of a CDROM differnce.
On Mandrake 7.2 it is smaller
165884 /mdk/bin/gawk
Anyway, since 1996 I'm sure, the focus of the GNU awk effort is gawk,
but what's the use if it never gets used? [unless one goes out of their
way]. I mean if it gets used then if any problems are encountered
they can get fixed, yes, in the core non-extensions part.
Anyways, what if all the other debian packages took the same "stopped" approach?
Anyways, just try a mawk --help or a mawk --anything vs. gawk's to see
what 6 years of user friendliness has improved.
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