From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113 Description of problem: Awk from RHN for RHEL 3.0 does not honor the FIELDWIDTHS variable. Instead of breaking down an item into its atomic pieces to be counted out as described under the FIELDWIDTHS topic for man awk, it continues to behave as if FS=" " were still in effect, which is a setting that is supposed to be overridden when the FIELDWIDTHS variable is used. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gawk-3.1.1-9 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.echo 1234567 | awk -v FIELDWIDTHS="1 4 1" '{print $1}' 2.echo 1234567 | awk -v FIELDWIDTHS="1 4 1" '{print $2}' 3. Actual Results: >1234567 > > Expected Results: >1 >2345 Additional info:
This works fine for me; please append the output of the following commands: which awk rpm -V gawk echo 1234567 | awk -W lint -v FIELDWIDTHS="1 4 1" '{print $2}' Thanks.
This ended up being an issue whith whether or not POSIX compliance was in effect. The POSIXLY_CORRECT variable was set on my environment to 1. This version of gawk honors that variable to toggle POSIX compliance in the manner described in man gawk . The older version I was comparing it against did not behave this way. Thank you for your time on this issue. The hint was as follows: $ echo 1234567 | awk -W lint -v FIELDWIDTHS="1 4 1" '{print $2}' $ awk: warning: `FIELDWIDTHS' is a gawk extension $ awk: warning: environment variable `POSIXLY_CORRECT' set: turning on `--posix'