gawk segmentation fault with Linux menuconfig

[Andrew Church]

     I recently came across what appears to be a problem with gawk: when
running the Linux "menuconfig" script (scripts/Menuconfig in the kernel
distribution), awk is called (around line 700 as of version 2.4.10) to
parse the Config.in files; these files can recursively include other files
(typically Config.in files from subdirectories).  However, if a file
referenced does not exist, gawk will crash with a segmentation fault.
I have reproduced this in Linux 2.4.10 by renaming net/ipv4/Config.in to
net/ipv4/Config.inx so that it is not found during parsing.  I have not
been able to narrow down the bug further due to a lack of experience with
awk, but decided I should at least report the problem.

  --Andrew Church
    address@hidden
    http://achurch.org/