Re: How to make "division by zero attempted" error message more informative?

[Neil R. Ormos]

The original question (or maybe it was a feature request) was posted in the Bug 
Gawk list, but since I'm posting advice about how the poster can address the 
problem him/herself, without any change to gawk, I'm replying here in the Help 
Gawk list.

Peng Yu wrote:

> I see something like this. But when this kind of command is called at
> multiple scripts. It is hard to tell where the error is from.
>
> $ awk -e '{ print 10/$1 }' <<< 0
> awk: cmd. line:1: (FILENAME=- FNR=1) fatal: division by zero attempted
>
> Is there a way to customize the error message so that I can know where the
> error is coming from? Thanks.

One way to address this:

Gawk error messages are prefaced with the name by which gawk was called.

For each call to gawk in the multiple scripts, you could create a symlink to 
the gawk executable with a different distinguishing name, and then call gawk 
using that name.  Then, each error message will be prefaced by the 
distinguishing name.

E.g., if you had something like this in the calling scripts (having already 
made the appropriate symlinks):

   ...
   gawk-special55     '{print    $1/0}'
   ...
   gawk-special66     '{print    $1/0}'
   ...
   gawk-special77     '{print    $1/0}'
   ...

the error message would finger the particular calling instance, like so:

  gawk-special55: cmd. line:1: (FILENAME=- FNR=1) fatal: division by zero 
attempted
  ==============