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Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2022 07:14:53 -0800
From: Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net>
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Subject: Re: [9front] [PATCH] awk(1): quote argument for -v option
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On Tue, Nov 29, 2022 at 01:10:26PM +0100, Anders Damsgaard wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> Running awk from rc, I found that I need to quote the arguments to awk's
> -v option, as in:
> 
> 	awk -v 'myvar=asdf' 'BEGIN{print myvar}'
> 
> However, the awk man page specifies this without quotes as "awk -v
> myvar=asdf".  I now realize that it will not work without quotes because
> rc tries to interpret the assignment operator.
> 
> Is this just a beginner mistake, being used to unix behavior, or worth
> documenting as in the patch below?
> 
> Thanks, Anders

I guess I'll be that guy again

I know that the quoting quirk is a characteristic of rc and not whatever
other environment one might conceivably use to launch awk.  I get that
under most unix shells this is a non-issue.  However, the quoted variant
also works fine in e.g. bash and ksh and so forth.  It's all the same to
awk.

I submit as my actual argument that having documentation containing
examples which, when copied and pasted into the primary UI of the
project, do not work, is bad form.  People read man pages to learn how
to use shit, not to get a sense of the general aesthetic of a given
command were we to run it on v7 Unix.  The shit we say should work
should work.  

I vote the patch goes in.

khm