Mawk -- an implementation of new/posix awk
version 1.3.2

Installation instructions in file INSTALL.

Bug reports, comments, questions, etc. to
Mike Brennan, [email protected].
ftp site: ftp.whidbey.net in ~/pub/brennan

Version 1.3 implements a new internal design for arrays. See file
CHANGES.

Version 1.2.2 is best for MsDOS
---------------------------------------------------------

Changes from version 1.1.4 to 1.2:

1) Limit on code size set by #define in sizes.h is gone.

2) A number of obscure bugs have been fixed such as,
you can now make a recursive function call inside a for( i in A) loop.
Function calls with array parameters in loop expressions sometimes
generated erroneous internal code.

See RCS log comments in code for details.

Reported bugs are fixed.

3) new -W options


-We file : reads commands from file and next argument, regardless
of form, is ARGV[1]. Useful for passing -v , -f etc to
an awk program started with #!/.../mawk


#!/usr/local/bin/mawk -We

myprogram -v works, while

#!/usr/local/bin/mawk -f

myprogram -v gives error message
mawk: option -v lacks argument

This is really a posix bozo. Posix says you end arguments with
-- , but this doesn't work with the #! convention.



-W interactive : forces stdout to be unbuffered and stdin to
be line buffered. Records from stdin are lines regardless of
the value of RS. Useful for interaction with a mawk on a pipe.

-W dump, -Wd : disassembles internal code to stdout (used to be
stderr) and exits 0.

4) FS = "" causes each record to be broken into characters and placed
into $1,$2 ...

same with split(x,A,"") and split(x,A,//)


5) print > "/dev/stdout" writes to stdout, exactly the same as
print

This is useful for passing stdout to

function my_special_output_routine(s, file)
{
# do something fancy with s
print s > file
}


6) New built-in function fflush() -- copied from the lastest att awk.

fflush() : flushes stdout and returns 0
fflush(file) flushes file and returns 0; if file was not an
open output file then returns -1.

7) delete A ; -- removes all elements of the array A

intended to replace:

for( i in A) delete A[i]

8) mawk errors such as compilation failure, file open failure, etc.
now exit 2 which reserves exit 1 for the user.

9) No program now silently exits 0, prior behavior was to exit 2 with
an error message