Originally Posted by Akshay Hegde

Split usage is wrong
from gnu

Code:

split(string, array [, fieldsep [, seps ] ])

Divide string into pieces separated by fieldsep and store the pieces in array and the separator strings in the seps array. The first piece is stored in array[1], the second piece in array[2], and so forth. The string value of the third argument, fieldsep, is a regexp describing where to split string (much as FS can be a regexp describing where to split input records; see Regexp Field Splitting). If fieldsep is omitted, the value of FS is used. split() returns the number of elements created. seps is a gawk extension with seps[i] being the separator string between array[i] and array[i+1]. If fieldsep is a single space then any leading whitespace goes into seps[0] and any trailing whitespace goes into seps[n] where n is the return value of split() (that is, the number of elements in array).

The split() function splits strings into pieces in a manner similar to the way input lines are split into fields. For example:

Code:

split("cul-de-sac", a, "-", seps)

splits the string ‘cul-de-sac' into three fields using ‘-' as the separator. It sets the contents of the array a as follows:

Code:

 a[1] = "cul"           a[2] = "de"           a[3] = "sac"

and sets the contents of the array seps as follows:

Code:

 seps[1] = "-"           seps[2] = "-"