13.4.3 awk Portability Issues

gawk’s internationalization features were purposely chosen to have as little impact as possible on the portability of awk programs that use them to other versions of awk. Consider this program:

BEGIN {
    TEXTDOMAIN = "guide"
    if (Test_Guide)   # set with -v
        bindtextdomain("/test/guide/messages")
    print _"don't panic!"
}

As written, it won’t work on other versions of awk. However, it is actually almost portable, requiring very little change:

• Assignments to TEXTDOMAIN won’t have any effect, because TEXTDOMAIN is not special in other awk implementations.
• Non-GNU versions of awk treat marked strings as the concatenation of a variable named _ with the string following it.⁹⁴ Typically, the variable _ has the null string ("") as its value, leaving the original string constant as the result.
• By defining “dummy” functions to replace dcgettext(), dcngettext(), and bindtextdomain(), the awk program can be made to run, but all the messages are output in the original language. For example:

  function bindtextdomain(dir, domain)
  {
      return dir
  }
  
  function dcgettext(string, domain, category)
  {
      return string
  }
  
  function dcngettext(string1, string2, number, domain, category)
  {
      return (number == 1 ? string1 : string2)
  }
  

• The use of positional specifications in printf or sprintf() is not portable. To support gettext() at the C level, many systems’ C versions of sprintf() do support positional specifiers. But it works only if enough arguments are supplied in the function call. Many versions of awk pass printf formats and arguments unchanged to the underlying C library version of sprintf(), but only one format and argument at a time. What happens if a positional specification is used is anybody’s guess. However, because the positional specifications are primarily for use in translated format strings, and because non-GNU awks never retrieve the translated string, this should not be a problem in practice.