For some reason when awk invoked by the usermode helper the command
always fails. Interestingly gawk does not suffer from this problem
which is why I never observed this failure since the distro I tested
with all had gawk installed instead of awk. Anyway, the simplest
thing to do here is to just make gawk mandatory. I've added a
configure check for gawk specifically and have updated the command
to call gawk not awk.