Re: Breaking a table of record rows into an array

In article <usqkgn$he7u$2@dont-email.me>,
Ed Morton  <mortonspam@gmail.com> wrote:

the effect of setting `NF` is
undefined behavior per POSIX and so will do different things in
different awk variants and even in 1 awk variant can behave differently
depending on whether you're setting it to a higher or lower than
original value

This is not true. The effect of setting NF was well defined
by the original awk book and also in POSIX.

Decreasing NF throws away fields. Increasing NF adds the
intervening fields with the null string as their values
and rebuilds the record.