gawk 4.2.0 released!

[Arnold Robbins]

Greetings all.

This note announces the next major release of GNU Awk: version 4.2.0.

The following files may be retrieved from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gawk,
or via HTTPS from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gawk:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 5602299 Oct 19 21:29 gawk-4.2.0.tar.gz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold     473 Oct 19 21:38 gawk-4.2.0.tar.gz.sig
-rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 2853125 Oct 19 21:28 gawk-4.2.0.tar.lz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold     473 Oct 19 21:38 gawk-4.2.0.tar.lz.sig
-rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 2948108 Oct 19 21:29 gawk-4.2.0.tar.xz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold     473 Oct 19 21:38 gawk-4.2.0.tar.xz.sig

This is a major new release, with a number of new features.  The relevant
part of the NEWS file is appended below.

This release represents over four years of very hard work by a number
of people.  I thank them all for their contributions, I could not have
done it by myself.

Differences from gawk 4.1.4 are not available; they would be too large.

The usual GNU build incantation should be used:

        tar -xpvzf gawk-4.2.0.tar.gz
        cd gawk-4.2.0
        ./configure && make && make check

Bug reports should be sent to address@hidden

Enjoy!

Arnold Robbins (on behalf of all the gawk developers)
address@hidden
------------------------------------------------------------
Changes from 4.1.4 to 4.2.0
---------------------------

1. If not in POSIX mode, changes to ENVIRON are reflected into
   gawk's environment, affecting any programs run by system()
   or for piped redirections. This can also affect built-in routines, such
   as mktime(), which is typically influenced by the TZ environment variable.

2. The series of numbers returned by rand() should now be "more
   random" than previously.  Gawk's rand() remains repeatable; you will
   get the same series of numbers each time you call rand() repeatedly,
   but this will be a different series than previously.

3. Multiple changes related to the pretty printer:

   * The --pretty-print option no longer runs the program too.

   * Pretty printing now preserves comments and places them into the
     pretty-printed file.

   * Pretty-printing now uses the original text of constant numeric values
     for pretty-printing and profiling.

   * Pretty-printing now preserves parenthesized expressions as they
     were in the source file. This solves several niggling corner cases
     with such things.

4. The igawk script and igawk.1 man page are no longer installed by
   `make install'.  They have been obsolete since gawk 4.0.0.

5. Gawk can now be built with CMake.  This is an alternative build
   system for those who may want it; gawk is not going to switch off
   use of the autotools anytime soon, if ever.

6. Gawk now processes a maximum of two hexadecimal digits in \x
   escape sequences inside strings.

7. Setting PROCINFO["redirection", "NONFATAL"] to true makes I/O
   errors for "redirection" not fatal, setting ERRNO. Setting
   PROCINFO["NONFATAL"] makes all I/O nonfatal. See the manual.

8. MirBSD is no longer supported.

9. `make install' now installs shell startup files
   $sysconfdir/profile.d/gawk.{csh,sh} containing shell functions to
   manipulate the AWKPATH and AWKLIBPATH environment variables.  On a Fedora
   system, these files belong in /etc/profile.d, but the appropriate location
   may be different on other platforms.

10. Gawk now supports retryable I/O via PROCINFO[input-file, "RETRY"]; see
    the manual.

11. The C API has undergone changes that break binary compatibility with
    the previous version. Thus the API version is now at 2.0.  YOU WILL
    NEED TO RECOMPILE YOUR EXTENSIONS to work with this version of gawk.
    Source code compatibility remains intact, although you will get
    compiler warnings if you do not revise your extensions. We strongly
    recommend that you do so.  Fortunately, the changes are fairly minor
    and straightforward.

    See the manual for the new features.

12. Revisions in the POSIX standard remove the special case for POSIX
    mode when FS = " " where newline was not a field separator. The code
    and doc have been updated.

13. Gawk now supports strongly typed regexp constants. Such constants
    look like @/.../.  You can assign them to variables, pass them to
    functions, use them in ~, !~ and the case part of a switch statement.
    More details are provided in the manual.

14. The new typeof() function can be used to indicate if a variable or
    array element is an array, regexp, string or number.

15. As promised when 4.1 was released, the old extension mechanism,
    using the `extension' function, is now gone.

16. Support for GNU/Linux on Alpha systems has been removed.

17. Optimizations are now enabled by default. Use the new -s/--no-optimize
    option(s) to disable them.  Pretty-printing and profiling automatically
    disable optimizations so that the output program is the same as the
    original input program.

18. Gawk now uses fwrite_unlocked if it's available. The yields a 7% - 18%
    improvement in raw output speed (gawk '{ print }' on a large file).

19. Passing negative operands to any of the bitwise functions now
    produces a fatal error.

20. Programs that toggle IGNORECASE a lot should now be noticeably faster.

21. The mktime function now accepts an optional second argument. If this
    argument is present and is non-zero or non-null, the time will be converted
    from UTC instead of from the local timezone.

22. The FIELDWIDTHS parsing syntax has been enhanced to allow specifying
    how many characters to skip before a field starts. It also allows
    specifying '*' as the last character to mean "the rest of the record".
    Field splitting with FIELDWIDTHS now sets NF correctly.  The documentation
    for FIELDWIDTHS in the manual has been considerably reorganized and
    improved as well.

23. The PROCINFO["argv"] array records all of gawk's command line arguments
    as gawk received them (the values of the C level argv array).

24. The DJGPP port has been revived and now has an official maintainer.

25. The manual has been translated into Italian!  The translation is
    included in the distribution.