GNU-Friends: Interview with Arnold Robbins

“You’re most known for hacking gawk, but you’ve also
been involved in some other utilities that many people might not be
aware of. For example, you’ve been involved in some parts of
fileutils, shellutils and you’ve also contributed some string and
memory functions (strchr, memset, memcpy and so on). The question
is of course, what makes someone get involved at such an early
stage of development? What was the incentive to get
involved?

“I’d been part of the USENET community since the early ’80s,
where writing and sharing code was a significant thing to do,
before the GNU project really got started (or, at least, became
well known).

“In 1987 I picked up a copy of the original book on awk, and got
interested in the language. But “new” awk was not widely available,
so I thought I’d see if the FSF had a version, and if I could get
involved in upgrading it to the features of new awk…”

Complete
Story