Ted Zlatanov wrote:
> mawk 1.3.3 Nov 1996, Copyright (C) Michael D. Brennan

Yeowch.  Talk about software archaeology.  Please install 'gawk'; it may be 
slower than mawk, but it's much better about compatibility, supports UTF-8, 
etc., etc.

To help forestall future problems like this I installed the attached patch into 
the emacs-24 branch; it should get merged into the master branch eventually.