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.