Essa variação funciona para mim:
$ echo "great#man" | awk '{split($0,a,"#"); } END {print a[1]; print a[2];}'
great
man
Na documentação on-line :
split(string, array [, fieldsep [, seps ] ])
Divide string into pieces separated by fieldsep and store the pieces in array and the separator strings in the seps array. The first piece is stored in array[1], the second piece in array[2], and so forth. The string value of the third argument, fieldsep, is a regexp describing where to split string (much as FS can be a regexp describing where to split input records; see Regexp Field Splitting). If fieldsep is omitted, the value of FS is used. split() returns the number of elements created. seps is a gawk extension with seps[i] being the separator string between array[i] and array[i+1]. If fieldsep is a single space then any leading whitespace goes into seps[0] and any trailing whitespace goes into seps[n] where n is the return value of split() (that is, the number of elements in array).