Re: Possible incorrect behaviour of AWK

[Andrew J. Schorr]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 17, 2020 at 02:18:06PM -0000, Phil J FIsher wrote:
> $ LC_ALL=C awk --posix 'BEGIN {RS="^---$";ORS="\n\n"}  {print $0,RS,NR}'

I think the problem here may be the anchor metacharacters. From the docs:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/gawk-split-records.html

     NOTE: Remember that in `awk', the `^' and `$' anchor
     metacharacters match the beginning and end of a _string_, and not
     the beginning and end of a _line_.  As a result, something like
     `RS = "^[[:upper:]]"' can only match at the beginning of a file.
     This is because `gawk' views the input file as one long string
     that happens to contain newline characters.  It is thus best to
     avoid anchor metacharacters in the value of `RS'.

When you say "$", do you actually mean "\n", for example?

Regards,
Andy