Help With AWK

[Arnold D. Robbins]

SunOS In article <4225 at kalliope.rice.edu> henry at sun.com (Henry McGilton -- Software Products) writes:
>James Murray and Bill Fulton correctly surmised that the version of awk
>documented in the book `The AWK Programming Language' is somewhat
>different from the plain version supplied with SunOS.
>
>I just wish here to add a general reminder to everybody that there are
>several books on the market purporting to document various features and
>applications of UNIX.  These books are oftimes written by people with
>access to as yet un-released versions of the applications running within
>Bell Labs.  Obviously, the authors wish to make themselves look good by
>writing about the newest, bluest, washes whitest versions of the software.

While this may be true in some cases, in the case of AWK it just doesn't
apply.  The book explicitly states that 'nawk' was shipped with System V
Release 3.1 *and* that it can be gotten from the ATT toolchest. (The price
for *source*, for a *site license* was $300 the last time I checked.
Almost anyone should be able to afford that.)

It is definitely Sun's, and everyone elses' (DEC, IBM, Pyramid, whoever)
fault that nawk isn't widely available on their *nix systems.  Pointing
fingers at book authors, *in this case*, is just a smoke screen.

I will also take a paragraph and plug GNU Awk, since I'm one of the
developers.  It is "free" in the FSF sense, and can be gotten via
anonymous ftp from prep.ai.mit.edu and anonymous UUCP from ohio-state.  It
can also be ordered on the FSF beta tape directly from FSF, of course.  It
is not bug free, but given its history, is suprisingly stable and useful.
We hope to have a bug fix release Real Soon Now.

Given how cheaply nawk can be gotten from the toolchest, *and* the availability
of gnu awk, there is no excuse (other than simply not knowing about them)
to not be using the "new" version of awk.

Arnold Robbins -- Emory University Computing Center | Unix is a Registered
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