How to test if a function is defined in awk?

Question

I am writing an awk program and I want it to run it both with mawk and gawk. I need a sorting function. I have written my own, but I want to use the builtin asort() function in gawk if available.

How do I know from inside my program if the asort() function is available ?

More generally, how can I test if a function (e.g. gensub()) is available ?

Answer 1

I can suggest an hack to determine if you are running mawk or gawk. Here it is

BEGIN {
  file = ARGV[0] " -W version 2>&1 | head -1"
  file | getline
  if ($1 == "mawk")
    print "mawk"
  else if ($2 == "Awk")
    print "gawk"
  close(file)
}

Answer 2

There's no portable way to test if a function exists in Awk. If you're calling the Awk script from a shell, you can make Awk calls to test for the existence of functions first.

if awk 'BEGIN {asort(a)}' <>/dev/null 2>/dev/null; then
  define_asort=
else
  define_asort='
function asort() { … }
'
fi
awk "$define_asort"'
  … rest of script …
'

If you're only trying to distinguish GNU Awk from others, you can test on some other GNU Awk feature. Calling an undefined functions causes a fatal error in Awk, but using an undefined variable is always fine and returns an empty value. You can in particular use PROCINFO[version], which since Gawk 3.1.4 contains the Gawk version number.

function my_sort(a) { … }
function sort_wrapper(a) { if (PROCINFO["version"]) asort(a); else my_sort(a); }