RE: HP-UX awk weird "feature" -t

[polar1]

Interesting.
I have the same results with AWK on POSIX. I noticed a couple of things from the examples displayed.
In the post: 1 aside from the full string [a-z] at or about 19 lines down, the bottom line did not end with the letter "z". The example from AIX showed no bottom line ending with "z" as well.
2 Running the command I noticed 2 null lines before the output suggesting 28 loops instead of 26.

I found this to work:
for l in [ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z ] ; do echo abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz |awk -F [$l] '{print NF ":" $l}' ; done
I added NF to the print command to give more information.
However I am not sure where the two extra loops (at the beginning) are coming from.

 

[PHV]

Get rid of the brackets: [ ]

Hope This Helps, PH.
FAQ219-2884
FAQ181-2886

 

[polar1]

oops! print - should be $1 instead of $l.

When I do not use the brackets the last line is missing the "z" and the 19th line prints the entire string. Same as the original post.