[xonix]

>There's tons of incompatible dialects. I think that shows the problem with what you're saying.

To my knowledge the major dialects in use are:

- One True Awk (aka bwk) (https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk) - this one is bundled in all *BSD/macOS

- Gawk (https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/) - this one is bundled in most Linux

- mawk (https://invisible-island.net/mawk/) - bundled in some Linux distros (?), known as the fastest byte-code compiled implementation.

All three have very good compatibility, but Gawk is super-set over POSIX standard. I have some evidence here, since I regularly test [1] against these implementations and even some others, like GoAWK.

[1] https://github.com/xonixx/makesure/actions/runs/1830978431