Re: gawk bug when calling system()

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:36:08 -0400
> From: Aharon Robbins <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> Hi. This is cc'ed to the bug list so that perhaps someone else can find
> the problem. (And bcc'ed to the gawk Windows maintainer.)
> 
> The issue is that under Windows, current gawk
> 
>       gawk 'BEGIN { print system("exit 11") }'
> 
> doesn't print the correct exit status.

I think that's because awk.h has this snippet:

    #ifndef WEXITSTATUS
    #define WEXITSTATUS(stat_val) ((((unsigned) (stat_val)) >> 8) & 0xFF)
    #endif

It does the wrong thing for Windows, since the status there is not
returned in the top 8 bits, but rather begins at the LSB.  I just
tried

   gawk "BEGIN { print system (\"exit 512\") }"

on Windows, and sure thing, it printed 2.