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 DEC C -- use either vmsbuild.com or descrip.mms as is. VAX C -- use `@vmsbuild VAXC' or `MMS/MACRO=("VAXC")'. On a system with both VAX C and DEC C installed where DEC C is the default, use `MMS/MACRO=("VAXC","CC=CC/VAXC")' for the MMS variant; for the vmsbuild.com variant, any need for `/VAXC' will be detected automatically. GNU C -- use `@vmsbuild GNUC' or `MMS/MACRO=("GNUC")'. On a system where the GCC command is not already defined, use either `@vmsbuild GNUC DO_GNUC_SETUP' or `MMS/MACRO=("GNUC","DO_GNUC_SETUP")'. Tested under Alpha/VMS V6.2 using DEC C V5.2 and under VAX/VMS V6.2 using DEC C V5.2, VAX C 3.2, and GNU C 2.7.1. GAWK 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. The source tree should be unpacked into a container file subsystem rather than into the ordinary VMS file system. Make sure that the two scripts, 'configure' and 'vms/posix-cc.sh', are executable; use `chmod +x' on them if necessary. Then execute the following two commands: |psx> CC=vms/posix-cc.sh configure |psx> make CC=c89 gawk The first command will construct files "config.h" and "Makefile" out of templates, using a script to make the C compiler fit 'configure's expectations. The second command will compile and link 'gawk' using the C compiler directly; ignore any warnings from `make' about being unable to redefine "CC". The configure script will take a very long time to execute, but at least it provides incremental feedback as it runs. Tested with VAX/VMS V6.2 + VMS POSIX V2.0 + DEC C V5.2.