Running `gawk' on VMS
.....................
Command-line parsing and quoting conventions are significantly
different on VMS, so examples in this Info file or from other sources
often need minor changes. They _are_ minor though, and all `awk'
programs should run correctly.
Here are a couple of trivial tests:
$ gawk -- "BEGIN {print ""Hello, World!""}"
$ gawk -"W" version
! could also be -"W version" or "-W version"
Note that uppercase and mixed-case text must be quoted.
The VMS port of `gawk' includes a `DCL'-style interface in addition
to the original shell-style interface (see the help entry for details).
One side effect of dual command-line parsing is that if there is only a
single parameter (as in the quoted string program above), the command
becomes ambiguous. To work around this, the normally optional `--'
flag is required to force Unix style rather than `DCL' parsing. If any
other dash-type options (or multiple parameters such as data files to
process) are present, there is no ambiguity and `--' can be omitted.
The default search path, when looking for `awk' program files
specified by the `-f' option, is `"SYS$DISK:[],AWK_LIBRARY:"'. The
logical name `AWKPATH' can be used to override this default. The format
of `AWKPATH' is a comma-separated list of directory specifications.
When defining it, the value should be quoted so that it retains a single
translation and not a multitranslation `RMS' searchlist.