Re: FreeBSD awk behavior change proposal

Rodney W. Grimes <[email protected]> wrote:
> My concers are/were along the lines that awk was explicitly
> setting or actually ignoring the users LC, what happens if
> some user WANTS to build a port using some other locale, could
> that lead to bad awk results, and a failed build.

In practical terms a port which behaves differently based on LOCALE
would be considered broken no?

My experience is when tools start honoring LOCALE etc, the only path to
retain consistent behavior is to override.
eg. want to know if a pid is valid in a shell script?

	case "`LANG=C LC_ALL=C kill -0 $pid`" in
	*:*such*p*) return 1;;	# not valid
	*) return 0;;		# valid
	esac
	
avoids portability headaches.

--sjg