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Re: Shell script or Perl?



On Fri, Jun 13, 2003 at 02:48:40AM +0300, Aryan Ameri wrote:
> On Friday 13 June 2003 01:01, John Hasler wrote:
> > Aryan Ameri writes:
> > > BTW, now that we are here, I wonder about the portability of awk.
> > > Is awk available on all major Unices?

awk itself is very portable. Just be careful about what subset of the
language you use; there's "old awk" and "new awk", and I'm not quite
sure that there aren't a few weird ancient holdouts that still have only
old awk.
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/utilities/awk.html
describes some of the differences.

Also avoid GNU extensions (described in gawk(1)) if you want to be
portable.

> > AFAIK POSIX requires it.
> 
> I'm really not an expert in Unix, and it's standards, but IIRC Windows 
> NT also passed the POSIX tests, and became POSIX compliant. And AFAIK 
> NT doesn't have awk or anything equivalent ot it. Or am I missing 
> something here?

Don't be misled. It has a partial POSIX compatibility layer, that's all.
In particular, Windows NT (to my knowledge) only implements POSIX.1, the
C language API, not POSIX.2 which covers shell utilities like awk.

The first hit for "Windows NT POSIX compliance" on Google is
http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/en-us/dnarwbgen/html/msdn_posix.asp,
which seems to cover this.

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]



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