(This section is of interest only if you know something about using the C language and the Unix operating system.)
The source code for gawk generally attempts to adhere to formal
standards wherever possible. This means that gawk uses library
routines that are specified by the ANSI C standard and by the POSIX
operating system interface standard. When using an ANSI C compiler,
function prototypes are used to help improve the compile-time checking.
Many Unix systems do not support all of either the ANSI or the
POSIX standards. The `missing' subdirectory in the gawk
distribution contains replacement versions of those subroutines that are
most likely to be missing.
The `config.h' file that is created by the configure program
contains definitions that describe features of the particular operating
system where you are attempting to compile gawk. The three things
described by this file are what header files are available, so that
they can be correctly included,
what (supposedly) standard functions are actually available in your C
libraries, and
other miscellaneous facts about your
variant of Unix. For example, there may not be an st_blksize
element in the stat structure. In this case `HAVE_ST_BLKSIZE'
would be undefined.
It is possible for your C compiler to lie to configure. It may
do so by not exiting with an error when a library function is not
available. To get around this, you can edit the file `custom.h'.
Use an `#ifdef' that is appropriate for your system, and either
#define any constants that configure should have defined but
didn't, or #undef any constants that configure defined and
should not have. `custom.h' is automatically included by
`config.h'.
It is also possible that the configure program generated by
autoconf
will not work on your system in some other fashion. If you do have a problem,
the file
`configure.in' is the input for autoconf. You may be able to
change this file, and generate a new version of configure that will
work on your system. See section Reporting Problems and Bugs, for
information on how to report problems in configuring gawk. The same
mechanism may be used to send in updates to `configure.in' and/or
`custom.h'.
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