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From: wls@astrovax.UUCP (William L. Sebok)
Newsgroups: net.bugs.4bsd
Subject: Re: Possible bug in awk?
Message-ID: <574@astrovax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Apr-85 11:58:31 EST
Article-I.D.: astrovax.574
Posted: Tue Apr  9 11:58:31 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 10-Apr-85 05:39:06 EST
References: <1143@topaz.ARPA>
Organization: Princeton Univ. Astrophysics
Lines: 20

> I have been trying to do some stuff with awk that I saw in an
> example in one of the Unix books and it doesn't work as I thought.
> It seems to me that the line:
> 
> echo "This is a test" | awk {$1 = "Foo"; print}
> 
> should print out "Foo is a test" but all I get when I try it is the
> original line.
> Is this a bug in awk?

I get "Foo is a test".  However I had to put single quotes around the argument
to awk to protect them from the shell (either sh or csh).  Could that be part
of the problem?

I also vaguly remember long ago installing a 4.2 BSD awk bugfix from Bill
Shannon of Sun that had something to do with fixing the behavior of assigment
to positional parameters.
-- 
Bill Sebok			Princeton University, Astrophysics
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