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

[Paul Eggert]

Richard Nolde <address@hidden> writes:

>     That does in fact make it work, but why the change and when was it
> documented?  The sample on page 230 of "Sed and Awk" 2nd edition by
> Doughtery and Robbins (who ought to know) uses the quoted external
> command but without any  variable interpolation. eg "date"

I don't have the book, but the command

  "date" | getline

should work just fine.  If the book uses a fancier notation that isn't
portable, please report a bug to the book author.

It might not hurt for gawk to warn about nonportable usage in this
area, if it doesn't already.