bin/143367: [patch] awk(1) treats -Ft as -F <tab>

[Alexander Best]

On Sat Dec 11 10, Bruce Cran wrote:
> [replying privately since you've reassigned the PR]
> 
> On Sat, 11 Dec 2010 19:57:13 GMT
> arundel at FreeBSD.org wrote:
> 
> > Back into the pool, since i was not able to contact Brian Kernighan.
> 
> Did you try bwk at cs.princeton.edu ? Wikipedia claims he's currently
> working at Princeton.

i was able to contact him using the email address you recommended.

the problem seems to be that according to bwk the behavior documented in this
PR was initially a feature and not a bug. so changing the semantics would break
historical behavior. i'll send another status update on this issue once bwk
decides which path he wants to follow:

1) changing awk's semantics or
2) mentioning this behavior in the awk(1) manual (BUGS section).

please also note that
awk -Ft '{ print $1, $2 }'
and
awk '{ FS="t" } { print $1, $2 }'
behave differently. the latter example interprets the "t" as regular character.
so there's also the issue of inconsistency.

cheers.
alex

> 
> -- 
> Bruce Cran

-- 
a13x