gawk on OpenVMS ¶To use 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.
If your gawk was installed by a PCSI kit into the
GNV$GNU: directory tree, the program will be known as
GNV$GNU:[bin]gnv$gawk.exe and the help file will be
GNV$GNU:[vms_help]gawk.hlp.
The PCSI kit also installs a GNV$GNU:[vms_bin]gawk_verb.cld file
that can be used to add gawk and awk as DCL commands.
For just the current process you can use:
$ set command gnv$gnu:[vms_bin]gawk_verb.cld
Or the system manager can use GNV$GNU:[vms_bin]gawk_verb.cld to
add the gawk and awk commands to the system-wide ‘DCLTABLES’.
The DCL syntax is documented in the gawk.hlp file.
Optionally, the gawk.hlp entry can be loaded into an OpenVMS help library:
$ LIBRARY/HELP sys$help:helplib [.vms]gawk.hlp
(You may want to substitute a site-specific help library rather than the standard OpenVMS 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 file name and retries
the file search. If ‘AWK_LIBRARY’ has no definition, a default value
of ‘SYS$LIBRARY:’ is used for it.