Re: lint warning: unnecessary mixing of `>' and `>>'

[Hermann Peifer]

On 20/10/2023 01.38, Andrew J. Schorr wrote:
> For #2, doesn't this code give the same result?
>
> awk --lint 'BEGIN { f="out.dat"; print "Hello" >> f; print "World" >> f; 
> close(f) }'

There is indeed no lint warning in the above case. One could however
imagine a lint warning like this in the above case: Unnecessary double
use of ">>"

> I guess the lint code is wondering why you'd bother to write it the first way.
> I suppose it's less typing to enter ">" for the second print instead of ">>", 
> but
> maybe ">>" is more consistent.

I bothered because the manual says something like this (loosely
speaking): Using ">>" for redirecting output to a file already opened by
an earlier print statement is unnecessary. In other words: using ">>"
for the second print would show that I haven't read the manual

;-) Hermann

PS: here the original (and somewhat more diplomatically phrased) text
from https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Redirection.html

"Subsequent writes to the same output-file do not erase output-file, but
append to it. (This is different from how you use redirections in shell
scripts.)"