Hi Scrutinizer,
Thanks for the information. I knew that the Solaris /usr/xpg4/bin/awk had a limit larger than LINE_MAX, but still "relatively" small. I didn't remember that nawk was unlimited.

The OS X 10.9 BSD-based awk also had a 3000 byte limit. I hadn't checked the limit lately not realizing that it had changed. Sometime between OS X version 10.9 and OS X Yosemite, version 10.10.4 that limit was raised considerably or removed. And, looking at the OS X awk man page, the usual BSD banner has disappeared. The command:

Code:

awk --version

now returns:

Code:

awk version 20070501

while the sed utility (whose man page still has the BSD General Commands Manual banner) command:

Code:

sed --version

still returns:

Code:

sed: illegal option -- -
usage: sed script [-Ealn] [-i extension] [file ...]
       sed [-Ealn] [-i extension] [-e script] ... [-f script_file] ... [file ...]

so I'm guessing that awk isn't from BSD anymore.