Awk script in DOS and Linux behaves differently :(

vidyak · #1 (**permalink**) 03-31-2009

Hi,

I have an awk script which performs simple operations of variable assignments and finally printing the variables in custom form.

Code:

BEGIN {FS=OFS="\n"}
{
   v1=substr($0,1,15)
   v2=substr($0,16,200)
   v3=substr($0,216,20)
   print v1 "|" v2 "|" v3
}

The input file being processed is a fixed width file of record length=4346. The above script works perfectly as expected on Windows (using Windows Unix utilities). When I try to run the same script "as is" on Linux, I get the following error -
a.awk:7: ^ invalid char '' in expression"

I tried to debug the above script line by line and I find that the second line (assigning value to v2) is causing issues on Linux. Wondering, if are there any limitations of using substr to read $0 repeatedly has issues on Linux?

Kindly help.

Thanks and Regards,
Vidya

cfajohnson · #2 (**permalink**) 03-31-2009

That script runs without any problem on my Linux box.

My first thought was that perhaps you had carriage returns in the file, but that doesn't seem to affect the script. However, try removing any carriage returns as a first step; it can't hurt.

After that, check to see whether there are any other non-ASCII characters in the file.

vidyak · #3 (**permalink**) 04-01-2009

Thanks a lot. Instead of using Editplus to edit the file remotely, when I edited the file directly on Linux, it worked fine for me too. I guess, Editplus inserted some sort of carriage return when saved on Windows which would have caused the problem.

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