From: Tim Freeman <tsf@cs.cmu.edu>
To: bovik@U.ERGO.CS.CMU.EDU
Subject: awk/bawk/gawk, stderr, /dev/tty
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 93 15:03:10 -0400
Message-ID: <6060.750279790@U.ERGO.CS.CMU.EDU>
Sender: Timothy_Freeman@U.ERGO.CS.CMU.EDU

For your archives:

In-reply-to: tsf@CS.CMU.EDU's message of Sat, 9 Oct 1993 23:34:59 -0400
Newsgroups: cmu.cs.unix.forum
Subject: Re: awk/bawk/gawk, stderr, /dev/tty
References: <CEnwMC.JLM.1@cs.cmu.edu>
Distribution: cmu
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In article <CEnwMC.JLM.1@cs.cmu.edu> tsf@CS.CMU.EDU (Timothy Freeman) writes:

   What version of awk do people use around here?  I have a program that
   causes core dumps with gawk and bawk, but not awk, so I seem to be
   stuck with awk.  Is this typical experience with the reliability of
   the different versions?

I got at least one answer "no", from a person who prefers gawk.

   I would like to add some error checking to my awk program.  I don't
   want to send the error to stdout because I typically use this program
   in a pipe.  Ideally I would like to send it to stderr and exit with an
   error status.  Does anyone know how to do this?  The man entry for
   gawk says 

	   printf "%s\n", "error" > /dev/tty

   should work, but gawk crashes and this gets a syntax error with awk.

Solution is to put quotes around the "/dev/tty".

Thanks for the help!  Bboards are great.  :-)

Tim