AWKLIBPATH Environment Variable ¶The AWKLIBPATH environment variable is similar to the AWKPATH
variable, but it is used to search for loadable extensions (stored as
system shared libraries) specified with the -l option rather
than for source files. If the extension is not found, the path is
searched again after adding the appropriate shared library suffix for
the platform. For example, on GNU/Linux systems, the suffix ‘.so’
is used. The search path specified is also used for extensions loaded
via the @load directive (see Loading Dynamic Extensions into Your Program).
If AWKLIBPATH does not exist in the environment, or if it has
an empty value, gawk uses a default path; this
is typically ‘/usr/local/lib/gawk’, although it can vary depending
upon how gawk was built.15
See Shell Startup Files, for information on functions that help to
manipulate the AWKLIBPATH variable.
gawk places the value of the search path that it used into
ENVIRON["AWKLIBPATH"]. This provides access to the actual search
path value from within an awk program.
Although you can change ENVIRON["AWKLIBPATH"] within your
awk program, this has no effect on the running program’s
behavior. This makes sense: the AWKLIBPATH environment variable
is used to find any requested extensions, and they are loaded before
the program starts to run. Once your program is running, all the
extensions have been found, and gawk no longer needs to use
AWKLIBPATH.
Your version of gawk
may use a different directory; it
will depend upon how gawk was built and installed. The actual
directory is the value of $(pkgextensiondir) generated when
gawk was configured.
(For more detail, see the INSTALL file in the source distribution,
and see Compiling gawk for Unix-Like Systems.
You probably don’t need to worry about this,
though.)