Running `gawk' on VMS
---------------------

   Command line parsing and quoting conventions are significantly
different on VMS, so examples in this manual or from other sources
often need minor changes.  They *are* minor though, and all `awk'
programs should run correctly.

   Here are a couple of trivial tests:

     $ gawk -- "BEGIN {print ""Hello, World!""}"
     $ gawk -"W" version     ! could also be -"W version" or "-W version"

Note that upper-case and mixed-case text must be quoted.

   The VMS port of `gawk' includes a `DCL'-style interface in addition
to the original shell-style interface (see the help entry for details).
One side-effect of dual command line parsing is that if there is only a
single parameter (as in the quoted string program above), the command
becomes ambiguous.  To work around this, the normally optional `--'
flag is required to force Unix style rather than `DCL' parsing.  If any
other dash-type options (or multiple parameters such as data files to be
processed) are present, there is no ambiguity and `--' can be omitted.

   The default search path when looking for `awk' program files
specified by the `-f' option is `"SYS$DISK:[],AWK_LIBRARY:"'.  The
logical name `AWKPATH' can be used to override this default.  The format
of `AWKPATH' is a comma-separated list of directory specifications.
When defining it, the value should be quoted so that it retains a single
translation, and not a multi-translation `RMS' searchlist.