  Copyright (C) 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
  
  Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
  are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
  notice and this notice are preserved.

README:

This is GNU Awk 3.1.8. It is upwardly compatible with the Bell Labs
research version of awk.  It is almost completely compliant with the
2004 POSIX 1003.1 standard for awk. (See the note below about POSIX.)

This is a bug fix release. See NEWS and ChangeLog for details.

Work to be done is described briefly in the FUTURES file.  Changes in this
version are summarized in the NEWS file. Please read the LIMITATIONS file.

Read the file POSIX.STD for a discussion of issues where the standard
says one thing but gawk does something different.

To format the documentation with TeX, use at least version 2000-10-27.17
of texinfo.tex. There is a usable copy of texinfo.tex in the doc directory.

INSTALLATION:

Check whether there is a system-specific README file for your system under
the `README_d' directory.  If there's something there that you should
have read and didn't, and you bug me about it, I'm going to yell at you.

See the file INSTALL for installation instructions.

If you have neither bison nor yacc, use the awkgram.c file here.  It was
generated with bison, and has no proprietary code in it.  (Note that
modifying awkgram.y without bison or yacc will be difficult, at best.
You might want to get a copy of bison from the FSF too.)

If you have a Windows32, MS-DOS or OS/2 system, use the stuff in the `pc'
directory.  Similarly, there is a separate directory for VMS and for
some other operating systems.

Ports for the Atari and old Tandem systems are supplied, but they are
unsupported.  Thus, their code appears in the `unsupported' directory.

Appendix B of ``GAWK: Effective Awk Programming'' discusses configuration
in detail. The configuration process is based on GNU Autoconf and
Automake.

After successful compilation, do `make check' to run the test suite.
There should be no output from the `cmp' invocations except in the
cases where there are small differences in floating point values, and
possibly in the case of strftime. Several of the tests ignore errors
on purpose; those are not a problem.  If there are other differences,
please investigate and report the problem.

PRINTING THE MANUAL

The `doc' directory contains a recent version of texinfo.tex, which will
be necessary for printing the manual.  Use `make dvi' to get a DVI file
from the manual. In the `doc' directory, use `make postscript' to get
PostScript versions of the manual, the man page, and the reference card.
Use `make pdf' to get PDF versions of the manuals.

BUG REPORTS AND FIXES (Un*x systems):

Please coordinate changes through Arnold Robbins. In particular, see
the section in the manual on reporting bugs. Note that comp.lang.awk
is about the worst place to post a gawk bug report. Please, use the
mechanisms outlined in the manual.

Email should be sent to bug-gawk@gnu.org.  This address sends mail to
Arnold Robbins and the general GNU utilities bug list.  The advantage
to using this address is that bug reports are archived at GNU Central.

Arnold Robbins

BUG REPORTS AND FIXES, non-Unix systems:

Amiga:
	Unsupported.

Alpha/Linux:
	Michal Jaegermann
	michal@harddata.com

BeOS:
	Unsupported.

MS-DOS:
	Scott Deifik
	scottd.mail@sbcglobal.net

MS-Windows:
	Unsupported.

OS/2:
	Andreas Buening
	andreas.buening@nexgo.de

Tandem:
	Stephen Davies
	scldad@sdc.com.au
	(Original Tandem port)

	Ralf Wildenhues
	<Ralf.Wildenhues@gmx.de>
	POSIX-compliant Tandem systems

VMS:
	Pat Rankin
	rankin@pactechdata.com

z/OS (OS/390):
	Dave Pitts
	dpitts@cozx.com
