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Installing gawk on VMS

To install gawk, all you need is a "foreign" command, which is a DCL symbol whose value begins with a dollar sign. For example:

$ GAWK :== $disk1:[gnubin]GAWK

Substitute the actual location of gawk.exe for $disk1:[gnubin]. The symbol should be placed in the login.com of any user who wants to run gawk, so that it is defined every time the user logs on. Alternatively, the symbol may be placed in the system-wide sylogin.com procedure, which allows all users to run gawk.

Optionally, the help entry can be loaded into a VMS help library:

$ LIBRARY/HELP SYS$HELP:HELPLIB [.VMS]GAWK.HLP

(You may want to substitute a site-specific help library rather than the standard VMS library HELPLIB.) After loading the help text, the command:

$ HELP GAWK

provides information about both the gawk implementation and the awk programming language.

The logical name AWK_LIBRARY can designate a default location for awk program files. For the -f option, if the specified file name has no device or directory path information in it, gawk looks in the current directory first, then in the directory specified by the translation of AWK_LIBRARY if the file is not found. If, after searching in both directories, the file still is not found, gawk appends the suffix .awk to the filename and retries the file search. If AWK_LIBRARY is not defined, that portion of the file search fails benignly.