The awk(1) manual describes (quote) "regular expressions are as in egrep; see grep(1)." This leads one to believe that awk(1) supports both basic REs and extended REs. A discrepancy/gap has been found in this stated coverage. one-true-awk (our awk(1)) does not support the word-boundary metacharacters (\< and \>) for matching beginning- and ending-of-word. Fix: There are two proposed solutions. 1. Add a note to the awk(1) manual stating it does not support all RE metacharacters (note that '\<' and '\>' are valid both as BRE and ERE). or 2. Enhance awk(1) to support these BRE/ERE metacharacters so that the awk(1) manual is accurate without a patch. How-To-Repeat: $ echo xxxa | awk '/xxx\>/{print}' ### this produces no output, as-is expected since ### the word "xxxa" does not end in "xxx" $ echo xxx | awk '/xxx\>/{print}' ### this too produces no output, indicating that ### \> is not a valid metacharacter for "end-of-word"
Swapping \< and \> (GNU syntax) for [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] (POSIX syntax) resp= ectively. This makes no difference as one-true-awk uses its own regular expression co= de (read: does not use libc which already supports [[:</>:]] word-bounding). --=20 Devin _____________ The information contained in this message is proprietary and/or confidentia= l. If you are not the intended recipient, please: (i) delete the message an= d all copies; (ii) do not disclose, distribute or use the message in any ma= nner; and (iii) notify the sender immediately. In addition, please be aware= that any message addressed to our domain is subject to archiving and revie= w by persons other than the intended recipient. Thank you.
Enhancing awk(1), we should add support for "\<" and "\>" (not "[[:<:]]" an= d "[[:>:]]"). The reason we should support the former syntax is due to the = awk(1) manual which says (rather sparsely) "regular expressions are as-in e= grep(1)". If we are to rectify the functionality-gap between the awk(1) manual and aw= k(1) functionality, we should either fix the awk(1) manual (for example, to= say "regular expressions are as-in egrep(1) except for \< and \>") or we s= hould (preferred) add support for \< and \> so that the manual becomes accu= rate without modification. That is to say, that awk(1) should _not_ be enhanced to support [[:<:]] and= [[:>:]] as this would only further add to the functionality-gap between wh= at is documented and what is expected. --=20 Devin _____________ The information contained in this message is proprietary and/or confidentia= l. If you are not the intended recipient, please: (i) delete the message an= d all copies; (ii) do not disclose, distribute or use the message in any ma= nner; and (iii) notify the sender immediately. In addition, please be aware= that any message addressed to our domain is subject to archiving and revie= w by persons other than the intended recipient. Thank you.
For bugs matching the following criteria: Status: In Progress Changed: (is less than) 2014-06-01 Reset to default assignee and clear in-progress tags. Mail being skipped
This is still a bug after the latest one true awk import.
Still a bug in 14.0 Upstream has indicated a reluctance to fix this.