Awk issues: system awk vs [ng]awk in ports

[John Korchok]

I recently posted about difficulty installing the ncursesw port. One of the
lines in the error message is

./MKparametrized.sh: line 61: 25116 Illegal instruction ${AWK-awk} '

I have the gawk port installed and I'm wondering if (g)awk problems are at
the root of it as well. 

John Korchok

> On Mar 22, 2007, at 6:38 PM, Randall Wood wrote:
> 
> > The problem with gnome-doc-utils is that the upstream maintainers 
> > accidently left some code in to force gawk to behave like awk when 
> > they shipped it, knowing that on linux, awk = gawk[1]. This port's 
> > configure system correctly detects for the presence of gawk, mawk, 
> > nawk, and awk (in that order).
> >
> > In any event, the next version of gnome-doc-utils will have this 
> > fixed, and, in the meantime, the Portfile has this fixed as of 
> > changeset 23035[2]. Port sync, port clean gnome-doc-utils, 
> and build 
> > again. I did not bump the revision as users with gawk 
> installed would 
> > not have noticed this problem.
> 
> Not sure if I have the fix yet ( I did the sync/clean/build 
> sequence) but this is the result. I removed gawk, since there 
> seem to be no dependencies on it. So where does this "awk -W" 
> come from? That is not supported in awk, and if configure 
> does its job, it shouldn't happen.
>