cygwin64 gnuplot 5.4 patchlevel 0 -all sciripts written for gnuplot 4.6 do not run.

[Kramer (US), Leonard]

I'm running cygwin64 on a Windows 10 platform .
None of my 5 existing, well established, gnuplot 4.6 scripts run under gnuplot-base 5.4 which I just installed.

Let's start with:

This fragment works as I intended under gnuplot 4.6.  It reads the first line of a file named in ARG1 and extracts the first field.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
inputfile = ARG1
starttime = system("head -c 37 " . inputfile . "| awk '{print $1}' " )
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

However, in gnuplot-base (5.4 patchlevel 0) 
The '$1' persistently translates to the second gnuplot-base command line argument (ie: ARG2).   It is not supposed to be assigned to anything as far as I know.  I have a work around but this appears to be a very severe bug.

This is only the first error I'm working through.   I'm actually working on restoring gnuplot 4.6.

Leonard Kramer, Ph.D.
Boeing Company HB3-20
Guidance, Navigation and Control
13100 Space Center Blvd.
Houston, TX 77059
Leonard.Kramer@Boeing.com