Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> That hangs as well, and I found out why: Gawk waits for input.

Ah, that could be due to an incompatibility with the MSYS shell; but the BEGIN 
can't hurt, and I installed the attached patch to redirect from stdin as well. 
Since this appears to be the real problem, I'd rather go back to the all-ASCII 
script, for portability to pre-POSIX shells (probably doesn't matter nowadays, 
but shouldn't hurt).