gawk on the Atari ST
An executable version of gawk should be placed, as usual,
anywhere in your PATH where your shell can find it.
While executing, gawk creates a number of temporary files. When
using gcc libraries for TOS, gawk looks for either of
the environment variables TEMP or TMPDIR, in that order.
If either one is found, its value is assumed to be a directory for
temporary files. This directory must exist, and if you can spare the
memory, it is a good idea to put it on a RAM drive. If neither
TEMP nor TMPDIR are found, then gawk uses the
current directory for its temporary files.
The ST version of gawk searches for its program files as described in
section The AWKPATH Environment Variable.
The default value for the AWKPATH variable is taken from
DEFPATH defined in `Makefile'. The sample gcc/TOS
`Makefile' for the ST in the distribution sets DEFPATH to
".,c:\lib\awk,c:\gnu\lib\awk". The search path can be
modified by explicitly setting AWKPATH to whatever you wish.
Note that colons cannot be used on the ST to separate elements in the
AWKPATH variable, since they have another, reserved, meaning.
Instead, you must use a comma to separate elements in the path. When
recompiling, the separating character can be modified by initializing
the envsep variable in `atari/gawkmisc.atr' to another
value.
Although awk allows great flexibility in doing I/O redirections
from within a program, this facility should be used with care on the ST
running under TOS. In some circumstances the OS routines for file
handle pool processing lose track of certain events, causing the
computer to crash, and requiring a reboot. Often a warm reboot is
sufficient. Fortunately, this happens infrequently, and in rather
esoteric situations. In particular, avoid having one part of an
awk program using print statements explicitly redirected
to "/dev/stdout", while other print statements use the
default standard output, and a calling shell has redirected standard
output to a file.
When gawk is compiled with the ST version of gcc and its
usual libraries, it will accept both `/' and `\' as path separators.
While this is convenient, it should be remembered that this removes one,
technically valid, character (`/') from your file names, and that
it may create problems for external programs, called via the system
function, which may not support this convention. Whenever it is possible
that a file created by gawk will be used by some other program,
use only backslashes. Also remember that in awk, backslashes in
strings have to be doubled in order to get literal backslashes
(see section Escape Sequences).
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