dom wrote:See:
https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update/issues/244 for info about gawk/mawk.
I will remove the gawk specific code in rpi-update once I've confirmed it fixes the issue.
I've also asked our packaging guy why many users have mawk rather than gawk installed
(I personally have gawk installed, but I guess that came in as a dependency on something I installed).
Upthread, someone mentioned that "gawk should be installed by default". The truth of that statement turns on which meaning of the word "should" is intended. On computer support board, people often use the word "should" as a soft form of the word "is". For example: Water should be wet.
Used in that sense, the statement is untrue/invalid, because, as we all know by now, Debian out-of-the-box has "mawk" as "awk". You have to install gawk yourself. It would be good if Raspbian did that for you, but I understand they want to keep to Debian as much as possible. The other sense of the word "should" is as in "It would be desirable if". For example: Raspbian should have gawk installed by default (but it doesn't).
For the record, I strongly feel that you should not remove the gawk-specific code from your scripts, because gawk is a good thing and its use should be encouraged. Rather, I think you should work to having gawk installed by default in Raspbian.
Finally, because gawk does have "non-standard extensions", I always invoke it by name. I never use plain "awk" in a script (or on the command line) because you never know what you're getting. Instead, I use "gawk"; note that this would cause the script in question to fail more directly (in a way more easily diagnosed), rather than generate a cryptic message about "strtonum".
If this post appears in the wrong forums category, my apologies.