Re: Is it appropriate to ask user-oriented questions on this list?

[Aharon Robbins]

In article <address@hidden> you write:
>I'm having trouble getting awk parsing to work when fields are
>separated by two different characters (space and colon).

You should probably be using -F'[: ]'.

>First off I was wondering whether this is the correct place to ask.

comp.lang.awk is for general awk questions. Read the gawk doc first to
learn the language.

>Also, I am running this on debian linux and the implementation of awk
>that was installed by default is called "mawk".
>
>This appears to be an optimized version that may differ from the gnu
>version.

It does indeed differ.  It is (sadly) pretty much unsupported, although
it often does run faster than gawk.

>Please let me know if this list is appropriate for discussing such
>matters.

Have fun,

Arnold
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Aharon (Arnold) Robbins                                 arnold AT skeeve DOT com
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