So I compiled awk with symbols and tried again, and awk failed like so: assertion "s < f->state_count" failed: file "/usr/src/external/historical/nawk/bin/../dist/b.c", line 568, function "pmatch" [1] Abort trap (core dumped) ${AWK} -f ${PKGSRCDIR}/mk/pkgformat/pkg/reduce...
Copying awk from the previous NetBSD 7.0 earmv5 install makes everything happy, it seems.
John