[vox-tech] hold on to your hats - perl vs python

[Micah Cowan]

Doug Huckaba writes:

 > Sun's awk is actually mawk, I found this because I had created a fairly 
 > complex ksh/awk script on linux systems at home only to get to the office 
 > and find that mawk behaves differantly to the switches and my *awk scripts 
 > wouldn't work. Back to the drawing board...

gawk has a variety of extensions; if you write to that, you will have
a hard time porting it to other systems (as you've discovered). POSIX
standardizes what must be available, and what command-line options
should be used - a generic UNIX book which covers awk can probably
show you what is safe to use. You can also get a copy of the latest
public drafts of the POSIX standard; but you have to join some mailing
list to get it.

-Micah