> The fact that most OSs have a POSIX compliant version of it You need to be cautious however, gnu awk can be somewhat inconsistent at times: try the followin

> The fact that most OSs have a POSIX compliant version of it You need to be cautious however, gnu awk can be somewhat inconsistent at times: try the following on various distros (and also an *BSD) for example: awk 'BEGIN {print "9.1" >= "8"}'; awk 'BEGIN {print "9.1" > "8"}'; awk 'BEGIN {print "9.1" < "8"}'; awk 'BEGIN {print "9.1" <= "8"}'; on OpenBDS, you get no output or a syntax error, on Debian, you get the correct result for < and <= in all cases, never for > (it's interpreted as a redirection), and >= only works with newer Debian versions (sid and maybe stretch). I know that the fix is simple: just put some parenthesis (awk 'BEGIN {print ("9.1" <= "8")}'), but I was quite amused to discover that a few days ago.