Debian awk and mawk substr bug (was semicolon bug)

[Alex Potanin]

Hello,

Chapman Flack wrote:

> Are you sure it is not a length() or substr() bug, rather than a (less likely)
> bug specific to semicolons?  Notice that the lines you give as input to awk
> differ between the two examples below; in the second example there is no
> semicolon on the first line of input.  The second example behavior is
> therefore consistent with an interpretation that length() or substr() is
> simply off by one, nothing to do with semicolons.
>
> -Chap
>  

Yes, sorry.

It appears to be substr() bug in Debian's *mawk* and Debian's *awk*. Not 
semicolon related and length returns the right value.


address@hidden:~/Purdue/CVSData/OpenVM$ /usr/bin/awk '{ print substr($0, 
0, length($0) - 6) } '
somestring123456
somestrin

address@hidden:~/Purdue/CVSData/OpenVM$ /usr/bin/mawk '{ print 
substr($0, 0, length($0) - 6) } '
somestring123456
somestrin

address@hidden:~/Purdue/CVSData/OpenVM$ /usr/local/bin/awk '{ print 
substr($0, 0, length($0) - 6) } '
somestring123456
somestring

Cheers,
Alex.

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Alex Potanin
PhD Student
SMCS, VUW

Office: +64 (4) 463 5302
Mobile: +64 (21) 737 654

http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~alex/
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