Linux Journal - September 2011

expecting greater productivity from using git and better ease of use for the user community. And, it’s nice to be using 21st-century tools.

Future Work

Some further interesting development remains to be done.

1. The XMLGawk Project (see Resources) is a fork of gawk based on 3.1.6 that provides better facilities for loading dynamic extensions and several very interesting extensions to go with those features. These should be merged into the main gawk code base and distribution, respectively.

2. Although gawk has had the ability to load extensions dynamically for many years, the API has not been stable or easy to use. I have designed an API for C functions that can be called from an awk program that is considerably better, but I have not implemented it yet. This should be done.

3. Currently, the gawk distribution builds three separate executables: regular gawk, pgawk (for profiling awk programs) and dgawk for debugging them. The new internals enable the possibility of making just one executable that could perform all three functions (based on command-line options). This should simplify the build process and definitely will reduce the total installation “footprint”.

4. The documentation could use further

100 | SEPTEMBER 2011 WWW.LINUXJOURNAL.COM
cleanup. Some of the examples cause
the documentation to show its age. (Who
uses dial-up BBS systems anymore?)

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Brian Kernighan, Stephen Davies and John Haque for reviewing this article.;

Arnold Robbins is a programmer, technical author, husband and father. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, he and his family have been living in Israel since 1997, where he now works writing software for a very large semiconductor manufacturing company. He has been involved with GNU Awk since 1987(!). In his non-copious spare time, he maintains gawk and its documentation, among other activities. Arnold is also the author or co-author of a number of UNIX- and Linux-related books from O’Reilly and Prentice Hall, which he hopes that all readers of this article will now run out and buy. For more information, see www.skeeve.com.