Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I've been charged with the task of finding out whether the scripts which we use on our current DYNIX (Sequent) UNIX box will continue to run happily on our soon-to-be-installed Sun Solaris box.

I'm fairly certain that they'll be OK, but I've heard mutterings about awk running differently on Sun systems. All I've found out is that the tolower and toupper commands do not work because the Sun awk is from a time before awk acquired these functions.

Does anybody know whether there are any other differences in the Korn shell language between these systems, or whether Sun systems implements any other standard commands in a strange way?

Many thanks.

Phil

The original awk language is what Sun has in its awk program. At some point, the authors of awk revised the language and they called the result "new awk". At first, most vendors shipped both awk and "new awk", which the latter being in a file called nawk. That is where Sun is today. They have both awk and nawk. Other vendors discarded the old awk, and renamed nawk to be awk.

So most everybody will have the new awk, but it might be called nawk or awk. On Sun, just use nawk and you will be fine.

Thanks.