[Bug 226112] awk(1) man page unclear about field separator, FS

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https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=226112

Jamie Landeg-Jones <jamie at catflap.org> changed:

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                 CC|                            |jamie at catflap.org

--- Comment #2 from Jamie Landeg-Jones <jamie at catflap.org> ---
Hi. Thanks for the reply.

I'll explain how I got here:

I wanted to do a quick hack to split a line at every character, and at that
point, I was not familiar with "awk" allowing a null character to do the job.

Hence, believing the strings was a regular expression, I set FS to "." which -
contrary to the manual - was taken as a literal, not a RE!

Indeed, in your description of the atom from re_format, you missed out:

"or a single character with no other significance (matching that character)."

As in your examples: You used examples where a single character is already a
literal character in RE, which isn't always the case:

% printf 'hello(world' | egrep '('
egrep: Unmatched ( or \(
% printf 'hello(world' | awk -F '(' '{print $1}'
hello

I know this is hardly a major error, but it is still inaccurate - especially in
the case of "."!

Just for info, the actual text from gawk (which probably phrases it better than
I did!) is:

"If FS is a single character, fields are separated by that character.  If FS is
the null string, then each individual character becomes a separate field. 
Otherwise, FS is expected to be a full regular expression."

Cheers, Jamie

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