FIXES

FIXES        revised:   2014-01-15 23:10 UTC

Near the beginning was the 1987 awk book:
     ''The AWK Programming Language''
Since then Dr. Kernighan  (the k of awk)  has updated it and
    fixed bugs. Updated Dec 20, 2012
File FIXES from the  source code:  "This file lists all bug fixes,
    changes, etc., made since the AWK book was sent to the
    printers in August, 1987."
    (( copyright:  awk_Lucent_Copyright_notice ))

Edited - reordered oldest to newest;  pruned out bug fixes;
    added undocumented features at the end.
    2014 - added dates, %* format, -Ft

added toupper and tolower functions (Oct xx, 1987)
recognize -- as terminator of command-line options
evaluate all arguments of built-in functions, as in C;  the appearance is that
    arguments are evaluated before the function is called
Added \a ("alert"), \v (vertical tab), \xhhh (hexadecimal)
ENVIRON array contains environment: if shell variable V=thing,
    ENVIRON["V"] is "thing"
multiple -f arguments permitted.

fixed order of evaluation of commandline assignments to match what the
    book claims: an argument of the form x=e is evaluated at the
    time it would have been opened if it were a filename (p 63).
added some missing ansi printf conversion letters: %i %X %E %G.
    no sensible meaning for h or L, so they may not do what one expects.
    made %* conversions work. (Jun 14, 1989)
added -v x=1 ... for immediate commandline variable assignment;
    done before the BEGIN block for sure.  they have to precede the
    program if the program is on the commandline.
    requires a separate -v for each assignment.

FILENAME is now defined in the BEGIN block (Oct 11, 1989)
"-" means stdin in getline as well as on the commandline.
Added \x to regular expressions (already in strings).
awk -f - reads the program from stdin.
enforce variable name syntax for commandline variables:
    has to start with letter or _.
added explicit check for /dev/std(in,out,err) in redirection.

added CONVFMT as in posix (Jul 23, 1993)
delete arrayname is now legal; it clears the elements but leaves
    the array, which may not be the right behavior.
enhanced split(), as in gawk, etc:  split(s, a, "") splits s into
    a[1]...a[length(s)] with each character a single element.
    made the same changes for field-splitting if FS is "".

added nextfile, as in gawk: causes immediate advance to next input file.
printf("%c", 0) to include a null byte in output.
added a "-safe" argument that disables file output  (print >, print >>),
    process creation (cmd|getline, print |, system),
    and access to the environment (ENVIRON).
added -V to print version number (Mar 12, 1998)

permit \n explicitly in character classes (Sep 24, 2000)
close() is now a function.  it returns whatever the library fclose returns,
    and -1 for closing a file or pipe that wasn't opened.
added support for posix character class names like [:digit:] (Nov 16, 2001)
fflush() or fflush("") flushes all files and pipes.
length(arrayname) returns number of elements (Jan 1, 2002)
subtle change to split: if source is empty, number of elems
    is always 0 and the array is not set.

values of $0 et al are preserved in the END block.
-version and --version options to print the version and exit (Jan 17, 2006)
a change to FS is now noticed immediately for subsequent splits.
changed srand() to return the previous seed (which is 1
    on the first call of srand).
split(s, a, //) now behaves the same as split(s, a, "") (Aug 7, 2011)

undocumented features:
command line switch -d dumps debug info.
valid filenames /dev/stdin /dev/stdout /dev/stderr
can use ** or **= in place of ^ for exponention.
array SYMTAB holds info.
from commandline:  -F "" is nojoy setting FS to null
    use -v FS="" instead.

the new escapes \a \v \xhh are nojoy from the -v var=value
    (although they work fine in the code)
    use octal instead ie -v alert=\007
system() returns errorcode / 256 (in windows)
cmd | getline;  n = close(cmd);  n is the errorcode
nojoy re  -v e==  use -v e=\075
-Ft sets FS to \t tab; whereas -v FS=t is the letter t.

                g0ph3r