On 09 Mar 2022 08:31, Sebastian Huber wrote:
> Other awk implementations such as mawk do not support the length() function.

those awk implementations are not POSIX compliant.  length() is
*not* a GNU extension.  you can see it clearly defined in POSIX:
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/awk.html#tag_20_06_13_13

that said, mawk does support length(), and has since at least 2008 in
the 1.3.3 release.  i stopped looking back further in the history.

so you're going to have to provide a bit more info as to what you're
trying to do here, and what tools & versions exactly you're using.
-mike