Re: gnu awk 3.1.5

[Andrew J. Schorr]

On Thu, Sep 14, 2006 at 04:20:08PM +0200, Morten Nygaard Åsnes wrote:
> On Thursday 14 September 2006 15:19, you wrote:
> >    gawk 'END {a=""; while(length(a)<10) a= (a "a"); print a} ' /dev/null
> 
> No, that does not help. I tried this,
> 
>   awk 'END {a=""; while(a!="aaaa") {a=a "a"; print a,length(a) }}' /dev/null
> 
> and it prints
> 
>   a 1
>   aa 1
>   aaa 1
>   aaaa 1
> 
> So it seems it is a problem with this combination of concatenation and 
> length() 
> 
> even stranger, this seems to work ok, just because of the assignment b=a.
> 
>   awk 'END {a=""; while(a!="aaaa") {a=a "a"; b=a; print length(a),length(b),a 
> }}' /dev/null
> 
>   1 1 a
>   2 2 aa
>   3 3 aaa
>   4 4 aaaa

Hmmm, which locale are you using?  And is this unpatched gawk 3.1.5?
Does it work OK if you set LANG=C in the environment?  If so, you
are running into some locale-related bugs.  Check out the discussion
thread with the subject 'locale-dependent assertion failure'.

   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-utils/2006-07/msg00047.html

The patch in that post may solve your problem...

Regards,
Andy

wstr.patch
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