Re: Possible bug in Gawk 3.1.3-7 under Fedora Core 2

[Andrew J. Schorr]

On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 08:55:47AM -0600, Richard Nolde wrote:
>     awk -v DESTDIR=$DATADIR ' \
>         { "dirname  " $1 | getline DIRNAME
>           "basename " $1 " .001" | getline BASENAME
> #### >>>>> The two previous lines appear to fail <<<<< #####

This can be seen in a much simpler example:

address@hidden: echo "foo/bar" | gawk '{"dirname  " $1 | getline DIRNAME; print 
$1,DIRNAME}'
sh: line 1: foo/bar: No such file or directory
foo/bar 

There is a trivial fix:

address@hidden: echo "foo/bar" | gawk '{cmd = "dirname  " $1; cmd | getline 
DIRNAME; print $1,DIRNAME}'
foo/bar foo

However, I do not understand why the first version does not work.
It is also broken in gawk 3.1.2.

-Andy

P.S. You could probably accomplish the same thing more efficiently by
implementing dirname and basename inside gawk (using gawk string functions)
instead of calling an external program.