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 VAX C V3.x -- use either vmsbuild.com or descrip.mms as is. These use CC/OPTIMIZE=NOLINE, which is essential for version 3.0. VAX C V2.x -- (version 2.3 or 2.4; older ones won't work); edit either vmsbuild.com or descrip.mms according to the comments in them. For vmsbuild.com, this just entails removing two '!' delimiters. Also edit config.h (which is a copy of file [.config]vms-conf.h) and comment out or delete the two lines ``#define __STDC__ 0'' and ``#define VAXC_BUILTINS'' near the end. GNU C -- edit vmsbuild.com or descrip.mms; the changes are different from those for VAX C V2.x, but equally straightforward. No changes to config.h should be needed. DEC C -- edit vmsbuild.com or descrip.mms according to their comments. Tested under VAX/VMS V5.5-1 using VAX C V3.2, GNU C 1.40 and 2.3. 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. Building and using GAWK under VMS POSIX: Ignore the instructions above, although vms/gawk.hlp should still be made available in a help library. Make sure that the two scripts, 'configure' and 'mungeconf', are executable; use `chmod +x' on them if necessary. Then execute the following two commands: |psx> configure vms-posix |psx> make awktab.c gawk The first command will construct files "config.h" and "Makefile" out of templates. The second command will compile and link 'gawk'. Due to a 'make' bug in VMS POSIX 1.0 and V1.1, the file "awktab.c" must be given as an explicit target or it will not be built and the final link step will fail. Ignore the warning "Could not find lib m in lib list"; it is harmless, caused by the Makefile's explicit use of -lm as a linker option which is not needed under VMS POSIX. Under V1.1 (but not V1.0) a problem with the yacc skeleton /etc/yyparse.c will cause a compiler warning for awktab.c, followed by a linker warning about compilation warnings in the resulting object module. These warnings can be ignored. Another 'make' bug interferes with exercising various components of the test suite, but all the actual tests should execute correctly. (The main exception being book/wordfreq, which gives different results due to VMS POSIX 'sort' rather than to 'gawk'.)