Re: User error or gawk bug?

[Micah Cowan]

Garrett Cooper wrote:
> Hi GNU folks,
>    While testing out something to emulate $(abspath ) in GNU make
> 3.81+, I tried wrote the following in awk:
>
>    gsub (/\/{2,}/, "")

You've stumbled on one of awk's (not gawk's) quirks. It supports
extended regexes, but they _don't_ support "intervals" (the "{2,}"), as
you've discovered. They were added in by POSIX, but gawk doesn't support
them automatically by default, because it would break too many awk
scripts that use "{" and "}" for their literal meanings (this is
explained in the manual).

You can force gawk to support them with --re-interval or --posix, but
IMO you're better off avoiding them, unless you're certain you'll be
using gawk (Ubuntu systems, for instance, install "mawk" as the default
awk).

-Micah