I have a question about traditional awk (that came up while working on Paolo's pending autotest patch), regarding this note in autoconf.texi: Traditional Awk has a limit of 99 fields in a record. You may be able to circumvent this problem by using `split'. Can I rely on the fact that splitting of $0 is done lazily? I.e.: perl -e 'print "x "x100;' | awk '{print $0}' works with Solaris 2.6 awk, but perl -e 'print "x "x100;' | awk '{print $1}' fails with | awk: record `x x x x x x x x x x ...' has too many fields | record number 1 but I would like to know whether we can rely on awk to not try the splitting if $i, i>0, is never referenced. If yes, then I suppose we can also simplify the config headers and config files awk scripts by not setting FS at all. OTOH, we might still want to set it as a safeguard measure against later changes that may happen to inadvertently introduce splitting again. Thanks, Ralf _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf