gawk modified its command line argument

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
  • gawk-3.1.7-6.el6

Issue

  • gawk-3.1.7 modified its command line argument in RHEL6 whereas
    gawk-3.1.5 in RHEL 5 did not.

Resolution

# yum update gawk

Root Cause

the gawk utility did not copy variables from the command
line arguments. As a consequence, the variables were not accessible as intended.

Diagnostic Steps

  This behavior changed between gawk-3.1.5 and gawk-3.1.6.  gawk-3.1.5
  replaced the '=' after parsing the command line, whereas gawk-3.1.6
  doesn't.  Upstream gawk-4.0.0 copies the contents of argv when
  assigning variables specified on the command line.
e.g

- Run the following commands
  $ echo toto | awk -v myvar=foo '{system("/bin/sleep 100")}' &
  $ ps h -o args -p $!
  $ awk -v myvar foo {system("/bin/sleep 100")
"=" between "myvar" and "foo" is missing

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