> Well, it seems like a line-length limitation.  The awk command is the
> most simple possible (awk { print $1 }) but apparently in this one
> instance it failed (``Input record too long'').  gawk could handle it.

USE_GNU_TOOLS+=awk for that particular package does not do the trick,
does it?

-- 
Georg Schwarz    http://home.pages.de/~schwarz/
 geos@epost.de     +49 177 8811442