Changes between SVR4 and POSIX awk

The POSIX Command Language and Utilities standard for awk introduced the following changes into the language:

• The use of `-W' for implementation-specific options.
• The use of CONVFMT for controlling the conversion of numbers to strings (see section Conversion of Strings and Numbers).
• The concept of a numeric string, and tighter comparison rules to go with it (see section Variable Typing and Comparison Expressions).
• More complete documentation of many of the previously undocumented features of the language.

The following common extensions are not permitted by the POSIX standard:

• \x escape sequences are not recognized (see section Escape Sequences).
• Newlines do not act as whitespace to separate fields when FS is equal to a single space.
• The synonym func for the keyword function is not recognized (see section Function Definition Syntax).
• The operators `**' and `**=' cannot be used in place of `^' and `^=' (see section Arithmetic Operators, and also see section Assignment Expressions).
• Specifying `-Ft' on the command line does not set the value of FS to be a single tab character (see section Specifying How Fields are Separated).
• The fflush built-in function is not supported (see section Built-in Functions for Input/Output).

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