gawkinet: Preface
Preface
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In May of 1997, Ju"rgen Kahrs felt the need for network access from
'awk', and, with a little help from me, set about adding features to do
this for 'gawk'. At that time, he wrote the bulk of this Info file.
The code and documentation were added to the 'gawk' 3.1 development
tree, and languished somewhat until I could finally get down to some
serious work on that version of 'gawk'. This finally happened in the
middle of 2000.
Meantime, Ju"rgen wrote an article about the Internet special files
and '|&' operator for 'Linux Journal', and made a networking patch for
the production versions of 'gawk' available from his home page. In
August of 2000 (for 'gawk' 3.0.6), this patch also made it to the main
GNU 'ftp' distribution site.
For release with 'gawk', I edited Ju"rgen's prose for English grammar
and style, as he is not a native English speaker. I also rearranged the
material somewhat for what I felt was a better order of presentation,
and (re)wrote some of the introductory material.
The majority of this document and the code are his work, and the high
quality and interesting ideas speak for themselves. It is my hope that
these features will be of significant value to the 'awk' community.
Arnold Robbins
Nof Ayalon, ISRAEL
March, 2001