tower@WHEATIES.AI.MIT.EDU (Leonard H. Tower Jr.) (04/12/89)
[ This software will soon be available for anonymous uucp on
osu-cis and anonymous ftp on gatekeeper.dec.com. -len ]
Forwarded-For: arnold@mathcs.emory.edu
A brand new release of GNU Awk (gawk) is now available for anonymous
ftp from prep.ai.mit.edu, in the file gawk-2.10.tar.Z. This version
represents a major improvemement over the last one (gawk 2.02). In
particular, most known bugs have been fixed, and the memory leaks have
been plugged. However, the code continues to undergo steady evolution.
The GAWK Manual is also included in this release. Here is a very
short list of the changes, extracted from the README.
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.
MS-DOS changes are included.
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.
This release should keep everyone happy for a while. If the situation
warrants, there will be a bug-fix release in the short term, but don't
look for a major release again for a while. (Yes, I'm being vague on
purpose.)
David Trueman deserves many kudos for an excellent job on all the hard
stuff described above.
As always, bug reports should go to David and/or myself, or to the
bug-gnu-utils/gnu.utils.bug mailing list/newsgroup.
Enjoy,
--
Unix is a Registered | Arnold Robbins -- Emory University Computing Center
Bell of AT&T Trademark | DOMAIN: arnold@unix.cc.emory.edu
Laboratories. | UUCP: gatech!emory!arnold PHONE: +1 404 727-7636
-- Donn Seeley | BITNET: arnold@emoryu1 FAX: +1 404 727-2599