Re: [bug-gawk] Awk gets stucked if no filename

[arnold]

Hello.

Thank you for submitting a bug report. 

Your understanding below is incorrect. When no filenames are named on
the command line, awk reads from standard input.  This is documented and
has been awk's behavior ever since it existed.

You can work around this in your script with something like

        awk '{print("hi")}'  $f /dev/null

Or be more careful to check $f before invoking awk, etc.

HTH,

Arnold

Xavier Martínez Serrano <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm not sure whether this is a bug or not, but at least is not the
> behaviour from standard Linux commands. If I add a pattern code but no
> filename to parse, awk gets stucked waiting:
>
> f=""
> $ awk '{print("hi")}'  $f
> ... <neverending wait>
>
> This is a problem when awk is used within shell scripts where the filename
> is supplied via a shell var. In case the filename is empty, the shellscript
> never ends.
>
> To my understanding if awk cant find the file should issue an "exit(1)".
>
> Many thanks in advance, greetings,
> Xavi