[JNRowe]

Have you flipped the final one? Both my Buster and Bullseye installation only have mawk.

Trying to dig in deeper makes my head explode though. mawk is marked required yet with update-alternatives priority of 5, and gawk is marked optional but with a priority 10. I guess the intention is that mawk is good enough for base installs, but you probably want gawk.

[tyingq]

It's definitely hard to track down. Mawk is often way faster than gawk, but gawk has more features (sockets even...crazy) and maybe fewer arbitrary limits.