Hi, In commit ef977865, awk was added as an external tool needed by makepkg. As you know, there is different awk implementations out there. nawk is the implementation shipped by default in non-GNU systems As far as I know. Unfortunately, awk usage in makepkg is not nawk-compatible. Command: %gawk '/^[[:space:]]*provides=/,/)/' B | sed "s/provides=/provides_list+=/" Output: provides_list+=('p1' 'p2' '3') # comment Command: % awk '/^[[:space:]]*provides=/,/)/' B | sed "s/provides=/provides_list+=/" Output: awk: illegal primary in regular expression ) at source line number 1 context is >>> /^[[:space:]]*provides=/,/)/ <<< ====================== Anyway, what is awk doing here? Is it the same as: egrep '^\s*provides=\(.*\)'