Shell Programming and Scripting

in the bourne shell it accepts the var and var2 but the error at the end is

awk: syntax error near line 1
awk: bailing out near line1

I think typeset was another feature not working...

I really hope this is a professor trick and not an assignment where I'm expected to both learn shell scripting and decode what is and not a real part of the behaviour...

thanks again

also,

in my script I believe the first line

!#/bin/sh

is supposed to put me into the bourne shell???

It doesn't as I'm staying in tcsh

Code:

!#/bin/sh

should be

Code:

#!/bin/sh

if you're running on Sun/Solaris.... try using 'nawk' instead of plain/old 'awk'

ah my bad that was rushed typing I meant #! at the beginning lol... I nearly missed the bus to uni.

Yes using solaris, which they pointed out to me this morning. I got around the problem instead by simply piping the variables through from the beginning

echo var1 var2 | awk blah blah

it seems the simple ways are after all the most prone to success, I do have a tendency to run off and look for a function to easily do stuff instead of looking first at basic stuff like echo (of all things).

thanks for the nawk tip - I'll be avoiding awk for some time I'd expect or at least until my burnt fingers stop throbbing.

thanks again all for offering help and advice, greatly appreciated.

I just got an email from the uni as to what the issue turned out to be... out of interest I will post it for the rest.

-------------------------------------------------------

Hi Stephen,

A quick google search found the problem you're having. From

http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Awk.html

there are 3 "versions" of awk:

AWK - the original from AT&T
NAWK - A newer, improved version from AT&T
GAWK - The Free Software foundation's version

from the article:

"... all of AWK's features are in NAWK and GAWK. Most, if not all, of
NAWK's features are in GAWK. NAWK ships as part of Solaris. GAWK does
not. However, many sites on the Internet have the sources freely
available. If you user Linux, you have GAWK.

and

"... several UNIX vendors have replaced AWK with NAWK, and there are
several incompatibilities between the two."

So in asking your friends about this, they are no doubt using nawk or
gawk without realising, since it appears on their systems as awk.

On Solaris, nawk is a separate program to awk.

Your example code that fails with awk runs with nawk, since the
original awk doesn't support the "-v" command line parameter. I've
also checked with Dave about the problem you were having with the
percentage character on the end of a number, and again, nawk fixes
this problem.

Hope that's enough to get you going.

Cheers,

Tony