sed & awk, 2nd Edition

Commercial awks

There are also several commercial versions of awk. In this section, we review the ones that we know about.

MKS awk

Mortice Kern Systems (MKS) in Waterloo, Ontario (Canada)^[9] supplies awk as part of the MKS Toolkit for MS-DOS/Windows, OS/2, Windows 95, and Windows NT.

The MKS version implements POSIX awk. It has the following extensions:

• The exp( ), int( ), log( ), sqrt( ), tolower( ), and toupper( ) functions use $0 if given no argument.

• An additional function ord( ) is available. This function takes a string argument, and returns the numeric value of the first character in the string. It is similar to the function of the same name in Pascal.

Thompson Automation awk (tawk)

Thompson Automation Software^[10] makes a version of awk (tawk)^[11] for MS-DOS/Windows, Windows 95 and NT, and Solaris. Tawk is interesting on several counts. First, unlike other versions of awk, which are interpreters, tawk is a compiler. Second, tawk comes with a screen-oriented debugger, written in awk! The source for the debugger is included. Third, tawk allows you to link your compiled program with arbitrary functions written in C. Tawk has received rave reviews in the comp.lang.awk newsgroup.

Tawk comes with an awk interface that acts like POSIX awk, compiling and running your program. You can, however, compile your program into a standalone executable file. The tawk compiler actually compiles into a compact intermediate form. The intermediate representation is linked with a library that executes ...