Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!eutrc3!wsinkees
From: wsinkees@eutrc3.UUCP (Kees Huizing)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Strange behaviour of awk
Summary: The value of $0 seems to depend on whether it has been printed
Keywords: awk
Message-ID: <497@eutrc3.UUCP>
Date: 24 Feb 89 11:17:27 GMT
Reply-To: wsinkees@eutrc3.UUCP (Kees Huizing)
Organization: Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Lines: 31
References:
Sender:


In the use of the UNIX filter "awk" I encountered the following problem.
I want to save a line of input except the first field into a variable
for later use.  So I empty the first field and then assign the modified
record to the variable.
But how curious!  When I try the test case
	{$1 = "" ; x = $0 ; print x}
on the input
	Tom Dick Harry
I just get :  
	Tom Dick Harry
Testing the value of $0 by printing it
	{$1 = "" ; print}
yields the expected output
	 Dick Harry
So my solution is:
	{$1 = "" ; print >"/dev/null" ; x = $0 ; print x}
And this works!, yielding
	 Dick Harry

Now I have two questions:
1. How can the value of $0 depend on whether it has been printed or not?
   Is this a bug, or do I overlook some mechanism of awk?
2. Is there a direct way to get $2, $3, .... until the end of the line (record)
   without the somewhat dirty change of $1?  This was my original problem.

P.S. We have Ultrix 2.2 (appr. Unix BSD); I don't know how "new" our awk is.

Kees Huizing              wsinkees@eutrc3.UUCP -or- wsdckees@heitue5.BITNET
Dept. of Math. and Comp. Sc. - Eindhoven Univ. of Techn. - Eindhoven
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