In a UTF-8 locale, the two-byte sequence specified by the C string "\347\03" is not a valid character, and it looks like gawk is discarding th contents of that line (or at least the characters starting with the invalid byte sequence and following characters up to the end of the line) are being discarded without printing a diagnostic. The standards only specify the behavior of awk when the files it reads are text files, so it is allowed to do anything it wants in this case. (By definition, file1 is not a text file since it contains byte sequences that are not valid characters in the current locale.) As RudiC suggested, using the C locale (which uses a single-byte character set with all byte sequences being valid characters) instead of the en_US.UTF-8 locale (which uses a variable number of bytes to encode a character and some sequences do not form valid characters) should do what you want in this case. (Note, however, that even in the C locale, NUL bytes are not valid in a text file and, if the file is not an empty file, the last byte of the file must be a <newline> character, and no line in the file can be longer than LINE_MAX bytes long. On most systems, LINE_MAX is 2048. The standards don't allow LINE_MAX to be less than 2048. The command:

Code:

getconf LINE_MAX

will give you the limit on your system.) From what we have seen so far (i.e., the first three lines), file1 appears to be a valid text file in the C locale.