Re: "|&" co-process operator fails(WinNT4.0)

[Kenny McCormack]

In article <address@hidden>,
Paranji, Sanjay <address@hidden> wrote:
>Hi
>
>I am attempting to use "gawk" to communicate between a PC and a Unix host.
>As a test I wrote the following prog which starts a service to listen for a
>{filename} argument. While I could launch the service on a UNIX box with
>gawk 3.1, I could NOT launch this on the PC with gawk 3.1. I installed gawk
>on the PC myself by getting "djgpp" binaries, the PC is loaded with WinNT
>4.0 OS. The prog fails with the msg
>
>fatal: '|&' not supported
>
>All the docs seem to suggest that co-process operator works under the
>Microsoft Win environment. Am I missing something?. Thanks and Rgds, Sanjay

This is really more a comp.lang.awk topic than gnu.utils.bug (note X-post
and follow-up)

Anyway, the basic deal is that the only Windoze port of GAWK 3.1 that
supports the networking features is the Cygwin port.

Note that there *is* an ambiguity (aka, a non-orthogonality) in the
definition of the "|&" operator in GAWK.  The symbol was used to introduce
both of the following concepts -> co-processes and network operations <-
and this leads to an ambiguity in that a platform may be capable of
supporting one or the other of these, but not both, but the semantics
require that neither be supported in that case.

I suspect that supporting the co-process (but not the networking) stuff
under (non-Cygwin) Windows might not be too difficult, but so it goes...