README:

This is GNU Awk 2.10 Beta. It should be upwardly compatible with the
System V Release 4 awk. (Yes, you read that right.)

This represents a major improvement over the previous release. In
particular, most known bugs have been fixed, and the memory leaks have
been plugged.  However, the code continues to undergo steady evolution.
Known problems are given in the PROBLEMS file.

MS-DOS changes are included, see below for more information.

The gawk.1 man page is concise but (to the best of our knowledge) complete.
Included in this release is gawk.texinfo.  It does not document all the new
features in 2.10 not in 2.02;  that will be rectified. For the moment, the man
page should be considered authoritative when it conflicts with the
gawk.texinfo file.  This is basically the last release for which we will
be keeping the man page current.

CHANGES FROM 2.02

User visible changes:
	Gawk now accepts the ANSI \a and \x escapes.
	You may now use /dev/std{in,out,err} and /dev/fd/N to refer
		by name to the respective inherited open file descriptors.
	There are new tolower() and toupper() functions.
	The -i option and ~~ and !~~ are gone.
	A new variable, IGNORECASE, if non-zero causes *all* regular
		expression operations to be case-insensitive.
	A -V option to print the GNU short Copyleft info.

Other changes (the hard stuff):
	Almost all known bugs fixed.
	Memory leaks plugged.
	Lots of changes to improve performance.
	Everything is now under the new General Public License.

INSTALLATION:

The Makefile will need some tailoring.  Currently it is set up for
a Sun running SunOS 4.x.  The changes to make in the Makefile are
commented and should be obvious.

If you have neither bison nor yacc, use the awk.tab.c file here.  It was
generated with bison, and should have no AT&T code in it.  (Note that
modifying awk.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 an MS-DOS system, use makefile.pc, and choose one of att.getopt.c
or gnu.getopt.c.

BUG REPORTS AND FIXES:

Please coordinate changes through David Trueman and/or Arnold Robbins.

David Trueman
Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computing Science,
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

UUCP		{uunet utai watmath}!dalcs!david
CDN		david@cs.dal.cdn
INTERNET	david%dalcs@uunet.UU.NET

Arnold Robbins
Emory University Computing Center
Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA

DOMAIN:	arnold@emoryu1.cc.emory.edu
UUCP:	{ gatech, mtxinu }!emoryu1!arnold
BITNET:	arnold@emoryu1

If you can't contact either of us, try Jay Fenlason, hack@prep.ai.mit.edu
AKA mit-eddie!prep!hack.  During odd hours he can sometimes be reached at
(617) 253-8975, which is an MIT phone in the middle of the corridor, so don't
be suprised if someone wierd answers, or if the person on the other end has
never heard of him.  (Direct them to the microvax about 10 feet to their left.)

MS-DOS SUPPORT

Support for MSC 5.1 was supplied by Conrad Kwok and Scott Garfinkle.
Scott is the contact person if you have problems with the MS-DOS version,
smsdpg!seg@uunet.uu.net.  Of course, if it's a generic bug, we want to
hear about it too, but if it isn't reproducible under Unix, we won't
be as interested.