Re: FreeBSD awk behavior change proposal

Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

> In 2005, FreeBSD changed one-true-awk to honor the locale's collating order.
> https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/awk/b.c.diff?annotate=146322&pathrev=201988
> This was billed as a temporary patch. It was also compatible with
> the then-current behavior of gawk. That temporary patch has lasted 16
> years now.

 [ ... ]
 `
> To restore compatibility with other implementaitons of awk, revert this
> patch. FreeBSD is the odd-system out. It also has the nice side effect
> of eliminating the last of our differences with upstream one-true-awk.

Yes! Definitely! For a few years, I've already been building locally with
the following patch, so official parity would be useful!

Cheers, Jamie

--- contrib/one-true-awk/main.c.orig    2014-09-19 19:24:02.083097000 +0100
+++ contrib/one-true-awk/main.c 2018-05-24 14:53:38.539477000 +0100
@@ -62,7 +62,13 @@
        const char *fs = NULL;

        setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "");
-       setlocale(LC_COLLATE, "");
+       /* As per more recent POSIX, collation for anything other than the 'C'  */
+       /* locale is undefined. As it messes up with expected results with      */
+       /* exotic locales, we force it to 'C' here to restore expected          */
+       /* behaviour
+       /* setlocale(LC_COLLATE, "");                                           */
+       setlocale(LC_COLLATE, "C");
+
        setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "C"); /* for parsing cmdline & prog */
        cmdname = argv[0];
        if (argc == 1) {