Release Digest: GNU, July 9, 2003

Jul 10, 2003, 05:00 (0 Talkback[s])

Gawk 3.1.3

Greetings all.

Patch #3 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	2078246	Jul 09 01:47	gawk-3.1.3.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--	1	1239	101	1634022	Jul 09 01:45	gawk-3.1.3.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r--	1	1239	101	991725	Jul 09 01:43	gawk-3.1.3-ps.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--	1	1239	101	1152257	Jul 09 01:42	gawk-3.1.3-doc.tar.gz

This is a bug fix release. 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 bug-gawk@gnu.org.

Enjoy!

Arnold Robbins
arnold@skeeve.com

---

Changes from 3.1.2 to 3.1.3

1. Gawk now follows POSIX in handling of local numeric formats for input, output and number/string conversions.
2. Multibyte detection improved. See README_d/README.multibyte for more info about multibyte locales.
3. Handling of `close' made more POSIX-compliant for POSIXLY_CORRECT, see the documentation.
4. The record reading code was redone, again. This time it's much better. Really!
5. For RS = "n" and RS = "", gawk now only sets RT when it has changed. This provides considerable performance improvement.
6. `match' now sets all the subscripts in the third argument array correctly, even if not all subexpressions matched.
7. Updated to Automake 1.7.5. configure.in renamed configure.ac.
8. C-style switch statements are available, but must be enabled at compile time via `configure --enable-switch'. For 3.2 they'll be enabled by default. Thanks to Michael Benzinger for the initial code.
9. %c now always prints no more than one character, whatever precision is provided.
10. strtonum(<number>) now works again.
11. Gawk is now much better about scalar/array typing of global uninitiailzed variables passed as parameters. Once the parameter is then used one way or the other, the global var's type is adjusted accordingly. Thanks to Stepan Kasal for the original (considerable) changes.
12. Dynamic function loading under Windows32 should now be possible. See README_d/README.pcdynamic. Thanks to Patrick T.J. McPhee for the changes.
13. Updated to gettext 0.12.1.
14. Gawk now follows historical practice and POSIX for the return value of `rand': It's now 0 <= N < 1.