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From: djm@eng.umd.edu (David J. MacKenzie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: 'awk' test for file existance fails with nawk and gawk
Message-ID: <DJM.91Feb24003452@egypt.eng.umd.edu>
Date: 24 Feb 91 05:34:52 GMT
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (C-News)
Distribution: na
Organization: Project GLUE, University of Maryland
Lines: 16

In pl44 Configure does thus:

echo "First let's make sure your kit is complete.  Checking..."
(cd ..; awk '' `awk '$1 !~ /PACKINGLIST/ {print $1}' MANIFEST` >/dev/null || kill $$)
echo "Looks good..."

In other words, it relies on:
	awk '' files...
to exit with a nonzero status if not all of the files exist.
This seems to be what "old" awk does.
However, "new awk" (/bin/nawk on SunOs 4.1) prints nothing and exits
with status 0 in this case, and GNU awk prints a usage message.
Since these will be "awk" on many future systems (probably SVR4 and 4.4BSD),
I suggest changing the test to use some other method.
--
David J. MacKenzie <djm@eng.umd.edu> <djm@ai.mit.edu>