gawk 3.1.2 now available

[Aharon Robbins]

Greetings all.

Patch #2 to GNU Awk (gawk) 3.1 is now available. Gawk is the GNU project's
version of the AWK programming language.

The following files may be retrieved from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gawk:

-rw-r--r--    1 1239     101       2003860 Mar 21 02:14 gawk-3.1.2.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--    1 1239     101       1581562 Mar 21 02:12 gawk-3.1.2.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r--    1 1239     101        985820 Mar 21 02:10 gawk-3.1.2-ps.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--    1 1239     101        618847 Mar 21 02:09 gawk-3.1.2-doc.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--    1 1239     101        613311 Mar 21 02:08 gawk-3.1.1-3.1.2.diff.gz

This is a bug fix release.  A minor new feature is the asorti() function,
as well as multidimensional subscripts for match()'s third argument.
The relevant part of the NEWS file is reproduced below.

A .bz2 file is available for the full distribution to save download time.

The -doc.tar.gz file contains the TeX dvi and ``dribble'' files, while
the -doc.ps.tar.gz file contains PostScript versions of the manuals,
the man page, and the reference card.

The .diff file is a SHELL SCRIPT that should be executed with `sh'. It
sets things up correctly both before and after applying the embedded
context diff.  Note also that if you use the .diff file to upgrade,
you need to have the version of makeinfo from Texinfo 4.5 in order to
rebuild the *.info files.

Bug reports should be sent to address@hidden

Enjoy!

Arnold Robbins
address@hidden
------------------------------------------------------------
Changes from 3.1.1 to 3.1.2
---------------------------

1. Loops of the form:

        for (iggy in foo)
                next

   no longer leak memory.

2. gawk -v FIELDWIDTHS="..." now sets PROCINFO["FS"] correctly.

3. All builtin operations and functions should now fully evaluate their
   arguments so that side effects take place correctly.

4. Fixed a logic bug in gsub/gensub for matches to null strings that occurred
   later in the string after a nonnull match.

5. getgroups code now works on Ultrix again.

6. Completely new version of the full GNU regex engine now in place.

7. Argument parsing and variable assignment has been cleaned up.

8. An I/O bug on HP-UX has been documented and worked around. See
   README_d/README.hpux.

9. awklib/grcat should now compile correctly.

10. Updated to automake 1.7.3, autoconf 2.57 and gettext 0.11.5 ; thanks to
    Paul Eggert for the initial automake and autoconf work.

11. As a result of #6, removed the use of the dfa code from GNU grep.

12. It is now possible to use ptys for |& two-way pipes instead of
    pipes.  The basic plumbing for this was provided by Paolo Bonzini.
    To make this happen:

        command = "unix command etc"
        PROCINFO[command, "pty"] = 1

        print ... |& command
        command |& getline stuff

    In other words, set the element in PROCINFO *before* opening the
    two-way pipe, and then gawk will use ptys instead of pipes.

    On systems without ptys or where all the ptys are in use, gawk
    will fall back to using plain pipes.

13. Fixed a regex matching across buffer boundaries bug, with a
    heuristic.  See io.c:rsre_get_a_record().

14. Profiling no longer dumps core if there are extension functions in place.

15. Grammar and scanner cleaned up, courtesy of Stepen Kasal, to hopefully
    once and for all fix the `/=' operator vs. `/=.../' regex ambiguity.
    Lots of other grammar simplifications applied, as well.

16. BINMODE should work now on more Windows ports.

17. Updated to bison 1.875.  Includes fix to bisonfix.sed script.

18. The NODE structure is now 20% (8 bytes) smaller (on x86, anyway), which
    should help conserve memory.

19. Builds not in the source directory should work again.

20. Arrays now use 2 NODE's per element instead of three. Combined with
    #18, (on the x86) this reduces the overhead from 120 bytes per element
    to just 64 bytes: almost a 50% improvement.

21. Programs that make heavy use of changing IGNORECASE should now be
    much faster, particularly if using a regular expression for FS or RS.
    IGNORECASE now correctly affects RS regex record splitting, as well.

22. IGNORECASE no longer affects single-character field splitting (FS = "c"),
    or single-character record splitting (RS = "c").

    This cleans up some weird behavior, and makes gawk better match the
    documentation, which says it only affects regex-based field splitting
    and record splitting.

    The documentation on this was improved, too.

23. The framework in test/ has been simplified, making it much easier to
    add new tests while keeping the size of Makefile.am reasonable. Thanks
    for this to Stepan Kasal.

24. --lint=invalid causes lint warnings only about stuff that's actually
    invalid.  This needs additional work.

25. More translations.

26. The get_a_record() routine has been revamped (currently by splitting it
    into three variants).  This should improve long-term maintainability.

27. match() now adds more entries to 3rd array arg:
        match("the big dog", /([a-z]+) ([a-z]+) ([a-z]+)/, data)
    fills in variables:
        data[1, "start"], data[1, "length"], and so on.

28. New asorti() function with same interface as asort(), but sorts indices
    instead of values.  

29. Documentation updated to FDL 1.2.

30. New `configure' option --disable-lint at compile time disables lint
    checking.  With GCC dead-code-elimination, cuts almost 200K off the
    executable size on GNU/Linux x86.  Presumably speeds up runtime.

    Using this will cause some of the tests in the test suite to fail.
    This option may be removed at a later date.

31. Various minor cleanups, see the ChangeLog for details.