awk issue with RS in mac command line

Question

I have the following text file records.text

IronMan
1
2
3


Batman
1
2
3

I have the following awk command

awk 'BEGIN{ FS="\n"; RS="\n\n"} {print NR, ":", $1, $2}' records.text

I get the following output

1: Ironman
2: 1
3: 2
4: 3
5: 
6: Batman
7: 1
8: 2
9: 4

Expected output:
1: Ironman 1
2: Batman 1

Which is wrong. This means RS variable is not picked up and still using default "\n" as the record separator? Anyone else with the same issue? Any solutions?

Answer 1

Unlike gnu awk, OSX's BSD awk does not handle multiple-character record separators. You'll have to try it a different way, handling one line at a time.

Answer 2

From your expression, I do get (after adding missing }

awk 'BEGIN{ FS="\n"; RS="\n\n"} {print NR, ";", $1, $2}' file
1 ; IronMan 1
2 ;  Batman

Missing a 1 here, compare to what you like. PS this also need a gnu awk do to the multiple characters in RS

---

When you working with record separated by empty lines you should set record selector to nothing.

awk -v RS="" '{print NR, ";", $1, $2}' file
1 ; IronMan 1
2 ; Batman 1