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B.4.1 Defining What Is and What Is Not A Bug ¶

Before talking about reporting bugs, let’s define what is a bug, and what is not.

A bug is:

• When gawk behaves differently from what’s described in the POSIX standard, and that difference is not mentioned in this Web page as being done on purpose.
• When gawk behaves differently from what’s described in this Web page.
• When gawk behaves differently from other awk implementations in particular circumstances, and that behavior cannot be attributed to an additional feature in gawk.
• Something that is obviously wrong, such as a core dump.
• When this Web page is unclear or ambiguous about a particular feature’s behavior.

The following things are not bugs, and should not be reported to the bug mailing list. You can ask about them on the “help” mailing list (see Where To Send Non-bug Questions), but don’t be surprised if you get an answer of the form “that’s how gawk behaves and it isn’t going to change.” Here’s the list:

• Missing features, for any definition of feature. For example, additional built-in arithmetic functions, or additional ways to split fields or records, or anything else.

  The number of features that gawk does not have is by definition infinite. It cannot be all things to all people. In short, just because gawk doesn’t do what you think it should, it’s not necessarily a bug.

• Behaviors that are defined by the POSIX standard and/or for historical compatibility with Unix awk. Even if you happen to dislike those behaviors, they’re not going to change: changing them would break millions of existing awk programs.
• Behaviors that differ from how it’s done in other languages. awk and gawk stand on their own and do not have to follow the crowd. This is particularly true when the requested behavior change would break backwards compatibility.

  This applies also to differences in behavior between gawk and other language compilers and interpreters, such as wishes for more detailed descriptions of what the problem is when a syntax error is encountered.

• Documentation issues of the form “the manual doesn’t tell me how to do XYZ.” The manual is not a cookbook to solve every little problem you may have. Its purpose is to teach you how to solve your problems on your own.
• General questions and discussion about awk programming or why gawk behaves the way it does. For that use the “help” mailing list: see Where To Send Non-bug Questions.

For more information, see Fork My Code, Please!—An Open Letter To Those of You Who Are Unhappy, by Arnold Robbins and Chet Ramey.

A Note About Fuzzers

In recent years, people have been running “fuzzers” to generate invalid awk programs in order to find and report (so-called) bugs in gawk. In general, such reports are not of much practical use. The programs they create are not realistic and the bugs found are generally from some kind of memory corruption that is fatal anyway. So, if you want to run a fuzzer against gawk and report the results, you may do so, but be aware that such reports don’t carry the same weight as reports of real bugs do.