B.3.2.2 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’ has no definition, a default value of ‘SYS$LIBRARY:’ is used for it.