@ixtab: Oh, wow.

.
I'll see if I can dig up an old gawk build from Debian, see if that's the culprit...

.
EDIT: Yup, reproduced with gawk 3.1.7 from Debian oldstable.
I'll see how mawk fares, and if I can figure out a way to make this play nice with gawk 3.1...

.
EDITē: Yup, behavior changes between gawk 3 & gawk 4 to be expected. So, err, yeah, not sure it's fixable nicely, and awk gives me headaches, so... ;p.