(gawk.info.gz) Manual History

 
 The GNU Project and This Book
 =============================
 
 The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit organization dedicated
 to the production and distribution of freely distributable software.
 It was founded by Richard M. Stallman, the author of the original Emacs
 editor.  GNU Emacs is the most widely used version of Emacs today.
 
    The GNU(1) Project is an ongoing effort on the part of the Free
 Software Foundation to create a complete, freely distributable,
 POSIX-compliant computing environment.  The FSF uses the "GNU General
 Public License" (GPL) to ensure that their software's source code is
 always available to the end user. A copy of the GPL is included for
 your reference ( Copying).  The GPL applies to the C language
 source code for `gawk'.  To find out more about the FSF and the GNU
 Project online, see the GNU Project's home page (http://www.gnu.org).
 This Info file may also be read from their web site
 (http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/).
 
    A shell, an editor (Emacs), highly portable optimizing C, C++, and
 Objective-C compilers, a symbolic debugger and dozens of large and
 small utilities (such as `gawk'), have all been completed and are
 freely available.  The GNU operating system kernel (the HURD), has been
 released but remains in an early stage of development.
 
    Until the GNU operating system is more fully developed, you should
 consider using GNU/Linux, a freely distributable, Unix-like operating
 system for Intel(R), Power Architecture, Sun SPARC, IBM S/390, and other
 systems.(2) Many GNU/Linux distributions are available for download
 from the Internet.
 
    (There are numerous other freely available, Unix-like operating
 systems based on the Berkeley Software Distribution, and some of them
 use recent versions of `gawk' for their versions of `awk'.  NetBSD
 (http://www.netbsd.org), FreeBSD (http://www.freebsd.org), and OpenBSD
 (http://www.openbsd.org) are three of the most popular ones, but there
 are others.)
 
    The Info file itself has gone through a number of previous editions.
 Paul Rubin wrote the very first draft of `The GAWK Manual'; it was
 around 40 pages in size.  Diane Close and Richard Stallman improved it,
 yielding a version that was around 90 pages long and barely described
 the original, "old" version of `awk'.
 
    I started working with that version in the fall of 1988.  As work on
 it progressed, the FSF published several preliminary versions (numbered
 0.X).  In 1996, Edition 1.0 was released with `gawk' 3.0.0.  The FSF
 published the first two editions under the title `The GNU Awk User's
 Guide'.
 
    This edition maintains the basic structure of the previous editions.
 For Edition 4.0, the content has been thoroughly reviewed and updated.
 All references to versions prior to 4.0 have been removed.  Of
 significant note for this edition is  Debugger.
 
    `GAWK: Effective AWK Programming' will undoubtedly continue to
 evolve.  An electronic version comes with the `gawk' distribution from
 the FSF.  If you find an error in this Info file, please report it!
  Bugs, for information on submitting problem reports
 electronically.
 
    ---------- Footnotes ----------
 
    (1) GNU stands for "GNU's not Unix."
 
    (2) The terminology "GNU/Linux" is explained in the  Glossary.
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