Re: Error in number comparison

[Stepan Kasal]

On 23 May 2002 15:58:55 +0900, Miles Bader <address@hidden> wrote:
> I suspect gawk is treating them as octal numbers, using the `leading 0'
> convention of C/C++ (the gawk documentation talks about this, in the
> info node `(gawk)Nondecimal-numbers').
> 
> You can disable this behavior by using the `--traditional' option, but
> this also turns off other gawk features; I'm not sure if there's anyway
> to disable just the interpretation of octal constants.

Hallo,
        no, there is no other way to disable this behaviour of gawk, except
--traditional or --posix or setting environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT.
        Note that gawk doesn't treat numeric data on input treat as
non-decimal unless you explicitly ask for it (see the info node mentioned
above).  Thus:

address@hidden gawk-3.1.1]$ echo x | ./gawk '010 == 10 {print "yes"}'
address@hidden gawk-3.1.1]$ echo 010 | ./gawk '$1 == 10 {print "yes"}'
yes

(I know that every dollar in Makefile hurts :-)

Perhaps the best variant looks like this:

$ echo x | POSIXLY_CORRECT= ./gawk '010 == 10 {print "yes"}'
yes

I.e. you set the variable at the top of the Makefile and make sure it's
exported.

Hope this helps,
        Stepan Kasal