Re: Insertion of extra OFS character into output string

[Andrew J. Schorr]

On Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 03:12:02PM +0100, H wrote:
> Thank you for researching this. This machine is not slated to be upgraded at 
> this time. Is there a newer version of awk for CentOS 7 available somewhere 
> else?

There are a few approaches you could take:

1. You can download a more recent gawk tarball from one of the ftp servers
listed on the gawk website:
   https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/
Just build it and install it in a custom location, perhaps under /usr/local.
Something like:

   tar xf gawk-5.2.1.tar.lz
   cd gawk-5.2.1
   ./configure --prefix=/usr/local && make -j && make -j check && make -j 
install && echo Done

2. Try to build a newer rpm source package so that you can upgrade the gawk
version in the standard location. But I tried with the Rocky 8 and Rocky 9 gawk
source rpms, and both failed to build.
https://rockylinux.pkgs.org/8/rockylinux-baseos-x86_64/gawk-4.2.1-4.el8.x86_64.rpm.html
https://rockylinux.pkgs.org/9/rockylinux-baseos-x86_64/gawk-5.1.0-6.el9.x86_64.rpm.html
I did not try installing a binary rpm, since I'm guessing it may depend
on newer library versions than the ones on CentOS 7. But maybe it works.

3. Create your own gawk.spec file to enable you to build rpms from
a recent gawk tarball. It may be easiest to start with the CentOS 7
gawk spec file and then patch it to use the new tarball. I haven't tried
this.

Regards,
Andy