bugs in gawk metacharacters

[Daniel Gryte]

I am using RedHat 9.0, GNU bash ver2.05.8 and GNU awk 3.1.0

 

Suppose the file lab3.data has the following lines:

 

Mike Harrington:(510)548-1278:250:100:175

Guy Quigley:(916)343-6410:250:100:175

Chet Main:(510)548-5258:50:95:135

Elizabeth Stachelin:(916)440-1763:175:75:300

 

The bugs concern the metacharacter syntax for character replication,
specifically the following:

r{m}        should pick up the character r repeated exactly m times

r{m,}       should pick up the character r repeated at least m times

r{m,n}      should pick up the character r repeated between m and n times
inclusive

 

None of these these items work.

 

For example, to extract the lines whose first names have EXACTLY 4
characters the following should work:

 

awk '/^[A-Z][a-z]{3}/{print $1}' lab3.data

 

or 

 

awk '/^[A-Za-z]{4}/{print $1}' lab3.data

 

 

Note that + works fine and .  but that all of the character-replications
with curly braces {} fail.

 

 

Sincerely,

Daniel Gryte

John Abbott College Computer Science Dept.

Ste Anne de Bellevue, Quebec