(gawk) Manual History

Info Catalog

(gawk) History

(gawk) Preface

(gawk) Acknowledgements

 
 The GNU Project and This Book
 =============================
 
    The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a non-profit organization
 dedicated to the production and distribution of freely distributable
 software.  It was founded by Richard M. Stallman, the author of the
 original Emacs editor.  GNU Emacs is the most widely used version of
 Emacs today.
 
    The GNU project is an on-going effort on the part of the Free
 Software Foundation to create a complete, freely distributable, POSIX
 compliant computing environment.  (GNU stands for "GNU's not Unix".)
 The FSF uses the "GNU General Public License" (or GPL) to ensure that
 source code for their software is always available to the end user. A
 copy of the GPL is included for your reference ( GNU GENERAL
 PUBLIC LICENSE Copying.).  The GPL applies to the C language source
 code for `gawk'.
 
    A shell, an editor (Emacs), highly portable optimizing C, C++, and
 Objective-C compilers, a symbolic debugger, and dozens of large and
 small utilities (such as `gawk'), have all been completed and are
 freely available.  As of this writing (early 1997), the GNU operating
 system kernel (the HURD), has been released, but is still in an early
 stage of development.
 
    Until the GNU operating system is more fully developed, you should
 consider using Linux, a freely distributable, Unix-like operating
 system for 80386, DEC Alpha, Sun SPARC and other systems.  There are
 many books on Linux. One freely available one is `Linux Installation
 and Getting Started', by Matt Welsh.  Many Linux distributions are
 available, often in computer stores or bundled on CD-ROM with books
 about Linux.  (There are three other freely available, Unix-like
 operating systems for 80386 and other systems, NetBSD, FreeBSD,and
 OpenBSD. All are based on the 4.4-Lite Berkeley Software Distribution,
 and they use recent versions of `gawk' for their versions of `awk'.)
 
    This Info file itself has gone through several previous, preliminary
 editions.  I started working on a preliminary draft of `The GAWK
 Manual', by Diane Close, Paul Rubin, and Richard Stallman in the fall
 of 1988.  It was around 90 pages long, and barely described the
 original, "old" version of `awk'. After substantial revision, the first
 version of the `The GAWK Manual' to be released was Edition 0.11 Beta in
 October of 1989.  The manual then underwent more substantial revision
 for Edition 0.13 of December 1991.  David Trueman, Pat Rankin, and
 Michal Jaegermann contributed sections of the manual for Edition 0.13.
 That edition was published by the FSF as a bound book early in 1992.
 Since then there have been several minor revisions, notably Edition
 0.14 of November 1992 that was published by the FSF in January of 1993,
 and Edition 0.16 of August 1993.
 
    Edition 1.0 of `Effective AWK Programming' represents a significant
 re-working of `The GAWK Manual', with much additional material.  The
 FSF and I agree that I am now the primary author.  I also felt that it
 needed a more descriptive title.
 
    `Effective AWK Programming' will undoubtedly continue to evolve.  An
 electronic version comes with the `gawk' distribution from the FSF.  If
 you find an error in this Info file, please report it!   Reporting
 Problems and Bugs Bugs, for information on submitting problem reports
 electronically, or write to me in care of the FSF.
 

Info Catalog

(gawk) History

(gawk) Preface

(gawk) Acknowledgements