I have a question about traditional awk (that came up while working on
Paolo's pending autotest patch), regarding this note in autoconf.texi:
Traditional Awk has a limit of 99 fields in a record. You may be
able to circumvent this problem by using `split'.
Can I rely on the fact that splitting of $0 is done lazily? I.e.:
perl -e 'print "x "x100;' | awk '{print $0}'
works with Solaris 2.6 awk, but
perl -e 'print "x "x100;' | awk '{print $1}'
fails with
| awk: record `x x x x x x x x x x ...' has too many fields
| record number 1
but I would like to know whether we can rely on awk to not try the
splitting if $i, i>0, is never referenced. If yes, then I suppose we
can also simplify the config headers and config files awk scripts by not
setting FS at all. OTOH, we might still want to set it as a safeguard
measure against later changes that may happen to inadvertently introduce
splitting again.
Thanks,
Ralf
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