awk scripts problem after upgrade from RHEL-2.1 to RHEL-4

[Ben Russo]

inode0 wrote:
> On 5/16/06, Ben Russo <ben at muppethouse.com> wrote:
>> I thought maybe people knew what the problem might be.
>> And I wasn't so concerned about this simple AWK script as I was
>> that maybe the *cause* of this problem could break other things on the
>> server that I am not yet aware of.
> 
> Perhaps you could give us a small concrete example of it working and
> not working. How does it fail? What have you done to figure out where
> it is failing? I'm willing to attempt to reproduce the problem if you
> can share a bit more detail.
> 

Thank you very much for the offer.
We rewrote the old legacy AWK scripts using perl instead.
So no more problems.

I was hoping it might have been something like "export LANG=C"
or whatnot.  But it seems like this problem is pretty obscure, nobody 
else has seen it.  Since we fixed the problem it isn't worth looking into.

The output was strange.  When we ran the awk script it would
just ouput gibberish.  It didn't error out, it didn't crash. It ran. 
But it was nicely formatted gibberish, and looked like it was doing 
something, but it wasn't putting out the data we were looking for. And 
the output would change if you logged out and
then logged back in again.  Very strange.

-Ben.