gawkinet: Preface

 
 Preface
 *******
 
 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