Re: gawk version 3.1.3.1614

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,
  thank you very much for your bug report.  By reporting bugs, you help
us to improve the quality of the software.
  Unfortunately, in this case the problem doesn't lie in the gawk itself
but in difficulties with porting the software to Windows and in tricks
used to make such Windows port.

On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 12:00:26PM +0200, Roel Speerstra wrote:
> Till yesterday i've used GNU Awk 3.1.1
> And in that version the ' works fine!
...
> The 3.1.3.1614 is indeed version 3.1.3 build 1614...

In order to forward your bug report to the right people, you have to 
find out where did have you got the binary from. (When the bug report
get's to them they could tell you whether it's a misconfiguration on
your side, or whether it's their fault.)

There are several possible sources, I can name 4 of them:

http://www.cygwin.com
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net
http://www.delorie.com
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net

Perhaps your previous version was from www.delorie.com, ie. from DJGPP32
port. This port's binaries are in fact DOS binaries with 32bit extender,
not Windows binaries. They do most of the command line parsing on their own.

OTOH, other ports, like cygwin, rely on a unix-compatible shell, eg. bash,
to do the command line parsing.  (In unix-like OS's, the cmd line is parsed
by the shell, not the program.)

Please try to find out the source of both versions.

You probably have got the two versions from different sources, ie. from
different windows ports, which is why you see the differences in the behaviour.
It has nothing to do with the actual gawk version.

============
--- Practical advices:
Do you really need the new version?  Is there a bug fix or a new feature you
really need?  If not, just stay with the old version.

If the older version comes from a source which doesn't have gawk-3.1.3 yet,
you can ask them for it, or you can download the whole development environment
and recompile gawk-3.1.3 from sources.

Or you can read the documentation of the port which has 3.1.3 to fix your
configuration.

Or you can always use -f flag to be safe from the bad herritage of DOS.

Hope this helps,
        Stepan Kasal