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From: tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Import variables in to awk.
Message-ID: <1989Nov16.000616.9389@rpi.edu>
Date: 16 Nov 89 00:06:16 GMT
References: <10531@thorin.cs.unc.edu> <15919@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
	<20774@mimsy.umd.edu> <15924@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
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Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY
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In <15924@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) writes:

Jon> 1. Why isn't this mentioned in the BSD man page awk(1), or in the
Jon>    /usr/doc documentation about awk?

Oversight, I suppose.  SunOS manual page has it.

Jon> 2. What happens if you actually want to read in a file that has = in
Jon>    the filename?  How am I supposed to know what happens if the
Jon>    feature isn't mentioned in documentation? :-)

Good question.  I just tried a few different things which I thought
might work and none of them did.  It appears as though .*=.* patterns
which appear after a file name (/dev/null in my test case) are simply
ignored; they are neither interpreted as variable assigments nor as
file names.  I also tried passing it an arg of foo\=bar (my test case)
and it still did nothing.  In fact, it didn't even read stdin.  Hmm ...

Dave
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