Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > On the system that Bruno was testing, "awk" didn't work so "nawk" was > > preferred. > > So maybe we should verify that the "awk": we found satisfies our > needs, and not just rely on the name?
Yes, that would be most in line with the Autoconf principles. > E.g., we could see what "awk" > outputs for "--version", and judge by that? $prog --version does not help here, because nawk and mawk don't implement it. But what works, is a test whether $prog supports the function syntax: On this platform, gawk 'function foo () {}' 2>/dev/null nawk 'function foo () {}' 2>/dev/null both have exit code 0, whereas awk 'function foo () {}' 2>/dev/null has exit code 2. To implement this, use a variant of AC_CHECK_PROGS that accepts a test argument. (AM_PATH_PROG_WITH_TEST from gnulib/m4/progtest.m4 is not the right there here, because it searches only for a single program name, not multiple ones.) Bruno