B.3.4.2 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' is not defined, that portion of the file search fails benignly.