Awk print statement alters the argument variable's content

[Lundberg Christer <christer dot lundberg at scania dot com>]

This program run with GNU awk 4.1.4 (currently installed with Cygwin):

  awk '
    BEGIN { OFMT="%.8g"
            buf = 1+0.1
            buf = buf "a"
            print "Length before print:", length(buf)
            print buf " "
            print buf
            print buf " "
            print "Length after print:", length(buf)
          }
  '

produces the following output on our system:

Length before print: 4
1.1a 
1.1
1.1 
Length after print: 3

so it appears that the "print buf" statement unexpectedly alters the content of buf.
With awk 4.1.3, we got the expected output

Length before print: 4
1.1a 
1.1a
1.1a 
Length after print: 4


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