C.3 Adding New Built-in Functions to gawk

Danger Will Robinson! Danger!!
Warning! Warning!
The Robot

It is possible to add new built-in functions to gawk using dynamically loaded libraries. This facility is available on systems (such as GNU/Linux) that support the C dlopen() and dlsym() functions. This section describes how to write and use dynamically loaded extensions for gawk. Experience with programming in C or C++ is necessary when reading this section.

CAUTION: The facilities described in this section are very much subject to change in a future gawk release. Be aware that you may have to re-do everything, at some future time.

If you have written your own dynamic extensions, be sure to recompile them for each new gawk release. There is no guarantee of binary compatibility between different releases, nor will there ever be such a guarantee.

NOTE: When ‘--sandbox’ is specified, extensions are disabled (see section Command-Line Options.