Effective awk Programming, 4th Edition

Appendix B. Installing gawk

This appendix provides instructions for installing gawk on the various platforms that are supported by the developers. The primary developer supports GNU/Linux (and Unix), whereas the other ports are contributed. See Reporting Problems and Bugs for the email addresses of the people who maintain the respective ports.

The gawk Distribution

This section describes how to get the gawk distribution, how to extract it, and then what is in the various files and subdirectories.

Getting the gawk Distribution

There are two ways to get GNU software:

• Copy it from someone else who already has it.

• Retrieve gawk from the Internet host ftp.gnu.org, in the directory /gnu/gawk. Both anonymous ftp and http access are supported. If you have the wget program, you can use a command like the following:

  wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gawk/gawk-4.1.2.tar.gz

The GNU software archive is mirrored around the world. The up-to-date list of mirror sites is available from the main FSF website. Try to use one of the mirrors; they will be less busy, and you can usually find one closer to your site.

Extracting the Distribution

gawk is distributed as several tar files compressed with different compression programs: gzip, bzip2, and xz. For simplicity, the rest of these instructions assume you are using the one compressed with the GNU Gzip program (gzip).

Once you have the distribution (e.g., gawk-4.1.2.tar.gz), use gzip to expand the file and then use tar to extract it. You can use the following pipeline ...