From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <396B1FCD.FEAF377@home.com>
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2000 08:23:25 -0500
From: Ed Brown <minimano@home.com>
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To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: [9fans] awk oddity?
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The following commands:
    awk '{print substr($0,1,8)}' bigfile >crud
        and
    awk '{print length($0,1,8)}' bigfile >crud

Seem to lock up awk on Plan9.   If I launch either one there will be a
flurry of hard disk activity then nothing.  A "ps" will reveal the
process is "ready", but the crud file stops growing at 8647 for the
first and 8192 for the second.   Rebooting doesn't change these numbers.

More perplexing:
if I
    tr 'A-Z' 'X' <bigfile >bigfile.noatoz
        or
    sed 100000q <bigfile >bigfile.100k

Then, use bigfile.noatoz or bigfile.100k the above awk scripts complete
successfully.

As a final check I tried the file on Linux.   There were no problems.

My environment is single box Plan9 using kfs with 96MB of RAM.
bigfile is:
    307312741 bytes.
    731593 lines.
    ascii text file with "\r\n" record separators


Does anybody have and idea what is going on here?

Thanks in advance

Ed Brown