Menu

gawk script stopped working on XP

Help
2007-10-10
2012-07-26
  • George Schubert

    George Schubert - 2007-10-10

    GNU Awk 3.1.3 on WinXP

    Was there a windows XP patch that came out around Sep that caused Gawk to not work completely?

    I have awk scripts that used to work fine on my XP and Win2kPro machines; but as of Sep 2007, they only partially work on XP now. The code still works fine on Win2kPro. Below is the error message:

    gawk: a.awk:59: (FILENAME=d.txt FNR=15) fatal error: internal error

    This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.
    Please contact the application's support team for more information.

    The odd thing is that, now, the awk code does process several lines of text; but stops when it does a more complicated match on XP. This code still runs fine on Win2kPro. My guess at this point, is that my Win2Kpro machine no longer gets patches pushed out by my company, whereas my XP machine does.

    It seems to be bombing when it reaches this line of text:
    PWA A12345-001-B-UNC B UNC 2 E

    on this line of code:
    if ( $2 ~ /^[A-Z][0-9]+-[0-9][0-9][0-9]?-[A-Z]+-[A-Z]+/ ) {

    Thanks, in advance, for any suggestions!
    -Schube

     
    • George Schubert

      George Schubert - 2007-10-26

      It took me a while; but I finally solved the problem. My awk scripts seemed to work on Win2kPro; but I started see them fail erratically when I started running them on XP. Turns out that I could, sometimes, get them to fail on Win2kPro as well, with an exit code of 3. The problem was elusive as the awk code would fail at various points, sometimes at a match statement, sometimes at a print statement, other times, not at all. I was reading through the known bugs for gawk and found that there is an issue with using IGNORECASE at times. Once I removed this IGNORECASE from my scripts, they became robust again. Thanks to all of you who post these bugs - you just made my day!
      -Schube

       
MongoDB Logo MongoDB