On Tue, 18 Jun 2024 at 07:57, Valery Ushakov <u...@stderr.spb.ru> wrote:
> My eye accidentally caught this phrase in awk(1), that says in the
> description of gensub():
>
> Note that the ‘\n’ sequences within replacement string s supported
> by GNU awk are not supported at this moment.
>
> I assume what it means to say is \<n> backreferences, not the 0xa NL
> character, but I wanted to ask the audience.
>
In src/external/historical/nawk/dist/run.c around line 2137, this is the
definition of gensub(), which does the work
Cell *gensub(Node **a, int nnn) /* global selective substitute */
/* XXX incomplete - doesn't support backreferences \0 ... \9 */
and, as I should not be commenting with information derived purely from
comments, I took a look and there's no code in gensub() that manipulates
backrefs.
Best,
Alistair
