Hi Igor, thanks for all your insightful advice.
However, none of your suggestions work ootb. This one doesn't do anything: > tmpname=`mktemp` > gawk -- "$expand_prog" /dev/stdin <<EOF >$tmpname > $program > EOF > eval gawk $opts -- -f $tmpname '"$@"' \ > && rm -f $tmpname If I understand the gawk man page right, -- is used to indicate the end of the gawk arg list. So the order of the args must be changed to gawk $opts -f $tmpname -- '"$@"' && rm -f $tmpname This happens to work - even under aix! The next one gives "xargs: argument line too long" : > gawk -- "$expand_prog" /dev/stdin <<EOF | eval xargs -0i gawk $opts > -- {} '"$@"' $program > EOF You suggested in one of your earlier replies to submit this as a fix upstream. How does one do that? Would you mind doing it instead? After all, you were really the one that came up with a solution. greets, H. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/