[Gnu-arch-users] Re: Solaris 8?

[Miles Bader]

Dustin Sallings <address@hidden> writes:
>       Has anyone tried to build tla on Solaris 8?  It failed pretty quickly 
> due to grep not having a -q, so I built a gnu grep and got around that, 
> but ended up here:
> 
> disk:/tmp/tla/src/=build 580> ../configure
> awk: syntax error near line 5

The cool thing about solaris is that all the user utilities were
frozen -- including bugs -- around 1977 (Yes!  Before sun was founded!).
This includes /usr/bin/awk, which is the oldest, cruftiest, buggiest
awk you can possibly imagine (e.g., no functions).  Isn't that special?

Sun includes a newer (though no doubt still absurdly riddled with bugs,
knowing Sun) version called /usr/bin/nawk, and many other OS
distributions include this as a compability link, which is why I usually
use /usr/bin/nawk in my awk scripts.  However apparently some vendors
don't do this, e.g., Colin reports than Redhat's Fedora 1 doesn't
include a nawk link.

For your sanity, I'd suggest installing gawk or something and calling
it `awk'.

I'm not sure what Tom's configure script should use, other than perhaps
searching for /usr/bin/nawk and using that if found, otherwise
defaulting to just `awk'.

-Miles
-- 
We live, as we dream -- alone....