[tex-live] how robustly call awk script?

[Florent Rougon]

Heiko Oberdiek <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de> wrote:

> The program env is happy with 'foo=bar awk -f', the value for
> 'foo' is 'bar awk -f', awk isn't run.

Right. env(1) has nothing to do with the problems mentioned here. The
problem is the *kernel* not splitting the line into several arguments as
you'd like it to. Relying on several arguments to the interpreter in a
shebang line has always been a portability issue, as you can see on:

  http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/shebang/

(in particular, have a look at the section labelled "Test results from
various systems")

This is probably why the env trick is popular within the Python
community, but much less popular among Perl people (because a Python
script called foo.py is usually called with 'python foo.py', not with
'python -w foo.py' or similar, whereas options such as -w are commonly
used when invoking Perl scripts).

-- 
Florent