Is it appropriate to ask user-oriented questions on this list?

[cga2000]

I'm having trouble getting awk parsing to work when fields are
separated by two different characters (space and colon).

First off I was wondering whether this is the correct place to ask.

Also, I am running this on debian linux and the implementation of awk
that was installed by default is called "mawk".

This appears to be an optimized version that may differ from the gnu
version.

Please let me know if this list is appropriate for discussing such
matters.