Compiling GAWK on VMS:

There's a DCL command procedure that will issue all the necessary

CC and LINK commands, and there's also a Makefile for use with the MMS

utility. From the source directory, use either

|$ @[.VMS]VMSBUILD.COM

or

|$ MMS/DECRIPTION=[.VMS]DECSRIP.MMS GAWK

DEC C -- use either vmsbuild.com or descrip.mms as is.

VAX C -- use `@vmsbuild VAXC' or `MMS/MACRO=("VAXC")'. On a system

with both VAX C and DEC C installed where DEC C is the default,

use `MMS/MACRO=("VAXC","CC=CC/VAXC")' for the MMS variant; for

the vmsbuild.com variant, any need for `/VAXC' will be detected

automatically.

GNU C -- use `@vmsbuild GNUC' or `MMS/MACRO=("GNUC")'. On a system

where the GCC command is not already defined, use either

`@vmsbuild GNUC DO_GNUC_SETUP' or

`MMS/MACRO=("GNUC","DO_GNUC_SETUP")'.

Tested under Alpha/VMS V7.1 using DEC C V6.4. GAWK should work

without modifications for VMS V4.6 and up.

Installing GAWK on VMS:

All that's needed is a 'foreign' command, which is a DCL symbol

whose value begins with a dollar sign.

|$ GAWK :== $device:[directory]GAWK

(Substitute the actual location of gawk.exe for 'device:[directory]'.)

That symbol should be placed in the user's login.com or in the system-

wide sylogin.com procedure so that it will be defined every time the

user logs on.

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,

|$ HELP GAWK

will provide 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 filename

has no device or directory path information in it, Gawk will look in

the current directory first, then in the directory specified by the

translation of AWK_LIBRARY if it the file wasn't found. If the file

still isn't found, then ".awk" will be appended and the file access

will be re-tried. If AWK_LIBRARY is not defined, that portion of the

file search will fail benignly.

Running GAWK on VMS:

Command line parsing and quoting conventions are significantly

different on VMS, so examples in _The_GAWK_Manual_ or the awk book

often need minor changes. They *are* minor though, and all the awk

programs should run correctly.

Here are a couple of trivial tests:

|$ gawk -- "BEGIN {print ""Hello, World!""}"

|$ gawk -"W" version !could also be -"W version" or "-W version"

Note that upper- and mixed-case text must be quoted.

The VMS port of Gawk includes a DCL-style interface in addition

to the original shell-style interface. See the help entry for details.

One side-effect of dual command line parsing is that if there's only a

single parameter (as in the quoted string program above), the command

becomes ambiguous. To work-around this, the normally optional "--"

flag is required to force shell rather than DCL parsing. If any other

dash-type options (or multiple parameters such as data files to be

processed) are present, there is no ambiguity and "--" can be omitted.

The logical name AWKPATH can be used to override the default

search path of "SYS$DISK:[],AWK_LIBRARY:" when looking for awk program

files specified by the '-f' option. The format of AWKPATH is a comma-

separated list of directory specifications. When defining it, the

value should be quoted so that it retains a single translation, not a

multi-translation RMS searchlist.

------------------------------

Thu Jun 18 05:22:10 IDT 2009

============================

On OpenVMS V7.3 (Alpha) the "manyfiles" test is known to fail. The reason

is not (yet) known.