From: utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: net.bugs.v7
Title: awk output size limits 
Article-I.D.: utzoo.2481
Posted: Mon Sep 20 19:31:26 1982
Received: Mon Sep 20 19:31:26 1982

Although awk(1) is perfectly capable of reading lines much larger
than 512 bytes, it cannot write them.  This appears to be an accident;
the definition of RECSIZE in run.c is what determines the output-line
limit, and it is set to 512 whereas elsewhere RECSIZE is 5*512.  I
have tried increasing RECSIZE to 1024 and have seen no ill effects.