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The GNU Project and This Book
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the production and distribution of freely distributable software. It was founded by Richard M. Stallman, the author of the original Emacs editor. GNU Emacs is the most widely used version of Emacs today.
The GNU(5)
Project is an ongoing effort on the part of the Free Software
Foundation to create a complete, freely distributable, POSIX-compliant
computing environment.
The FSF uses the “GNU General Public License” (GPL) to ensure that
their software’s
source code is always available to the end user. A
copy of the GPL is included
in this Web page
for your reference
(see section GNU General Public License).
The GPL applies to the C language source code for gawk
.
To find out more about the FSF and the GNU Project online,
see the GNU Project’s home page.
This Web page may also be read from
their web site.
A shell, an editor (Emacs), highly portable optimizing C, C++, and
Objective-C compilers, a symbolic debugger and dozens of large and
small utilities (such as gawk
), have all been completed and are
freely available. The GNU operating
system kernel (the HURD), has been released but remains in an early
stage of development.
Until the GNU operating system is more fully developed, you should consider using GNU/Linux, a freely distributable, Unix-like operating system for Intel®, Power Architecture, Sun SPARC, IBM S/390, and other systems.(6) Many GNU/Linux distributions are available for download from the Internet.
(There are numerous other freely available, Unix-like operating systems
based on the
Berkeley Software Distribution, and some of them use recent versions
of gawk
for their versions of awk
.
NetBSD,
FreeBSD,
and
OpenBSD
are three of the most popular ones, but there
are others.)
The Web page you are reading is actually free—at least, the
information in it is free to anyone. The machine-readable
source code for the Web page comes with gawk
; anyone
may take this Web page to a copying machine and make as many
copies as they like. (Take a moment to check the Free Documentation
License in GNU Free Documentation License.)
The Web page itself has gone through a number of previous editions.
Paul Rubin wrote the very first draft of The GAWK Manual;
it was around 40 pages in size.
Diane Close and Richard Stallman improved it, yielding a
version that was
around 90 pages long and barely described the original, “old”
version of awk
.
I started working with that version in the fall of 1988.
As work on it progressed,
the FSF published several preliminary versions (numbered 0.x).
In 1996, Edition 1.0 was released with gawk
3.0.0.
The FSF published the first two editions under
the title The GNU Awk User’s Guide.
This edition maintains the basic structure of the previous editions.
For Edition 4.0, the content has been thoroughly reviewed
and updated. All references to versions prior to 4.0 have been
removed.
Of significant note for this edition is dgawk
: The awk
Debugger.
GAWK: Effective AWK Programming will undoubtedly continue to evolve.
An electronic version
comes with the gawk
distribution from the FSF.
If you find an error in this Web page, please report it!
See section Reporting Problems and Bugs, for information on submitting
problem reports electronically.
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