Many versions of awk have various implementation limits, on things such as:
Number of fields per record
Number of characters per input record
Number of characters per output record
Number of characters per field
Number of characters per printf string
Number of characters in literal string
Number of characters in character class
Number of files open
Number of pipes open
The ability to handle 8-bit characters and characters that are all zero (ASCII NUL)
gawk does not have limits on any of these items, other than those imposed by the machine architecture and/or the operating system.
Copyright © 2003 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved.