How to programmatically detect awk flavor (e.g. gawk vs mawk vs nawk vs awk)

[Itamar Gal]

Hey autoconf gang,

I recently posted a question to unix.stackexchange.com asking for the best
way to programmatically determine which flavor of awk is present on a given
host.

Someone suggested using the AC_PROG_AWK macro, but didn't elaborate on how
this would work. Unforunately I'm only passingly familiar with the GNU
build system and I can't quite make sense of the autoconf source code that
I've looked at (e.g. programs.m4 and autoconf.m4f).

Can anyone here explain to a novice like me how I might be able to make use
of this macro to construct a simple bash script which determines which
variety of awk is in the path?

Here's a link to the post in case anyone would like to post their solution
there:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/236655/how-to-programmatically-detect-awk-flavor-e-g-gawk-vs-nawk

Thanks!

Cheers,
Itamar