This is the README for GNU awk 5 under Windows32.

    Gawk has been compiled and tested on MS-Windows using
the MinGW ports of the GNU development tools.

    The Cygwin environment (http://cygwin.com) may also be used
to compile and run gawk under Windows.  For Cygwin, building and
installation is the same as under Unix:

	tar -xvpzf gawk-5.2.x.tar.gz
	cd gawk-5.2.x
	./configure && make

The `configure' step takes a long time, but works otherwise.

Building gawk
-------------

Copy the files in the `pc' directory (EXCEPT for `ChangeLog') to the
directory with the rest of the gawk sources.  (The subdirectories of 
`pc' need not be copied.)  The Makefile contains a configuration 
section with comments, and may need to be edited in order to work
with your make utility.  Also, copy the file Makefile.ext to
extension/Makefile.

The "prefix" line in the Makefile is used during the install of gawk
(and in building igawk.bat and igawk.cmd).  Since the libraries for
gawk will be installed under $(prefix)/lib/awk (e.g., /gnu/lib/awk),
it is convenient to have this directory in DEFPATH of config.h. 

The makefile contains a number of targets for building the MS-Windows
version.  A list of targets will be printed if the make command is
given without a target.  As an example, to build gawk using the MinGW
tools, enter "make mingw32".

After you build in the top-level directory, chdir to the extension
subdirectory and say "make" there to build the extensions.  If you
built gawk without libmpfr, say this instead to build the extensions:

  make MPFR= MPFR_LIBS=


Testing and installing gawk
---------------------------

The command "make test" (and possibly "make install") requires several 
Unix-like tools, including an sh-like shell, sed, cp, and cmp.  Only 
GNU make is known to work on "make test".

There are two methods for the install: Method 1 uses a typical Unix-like 
approach and requires cat, cp, mkdir, sed, and sh; method 2 uses gawk 
and batch files. See the configuration section of the makefile.

The file test/Makefile may need some editing. A sample makefile with
comments appears in pc/Makefile.tst, and can be used to modify
test/Makefile for your platform.  For starters, just copy
pc/Makefile.tst to test/Makefile, then walk through the variables
defined at the beginning and change them as appropriate for your
setup.  In addition, some files in the test directory may need to have
their end-of-line markers converted, as described in Makefile.tst.
One change you will have to make for testing the MinGW port using the
MSYS Bash is to set SLASH to //.

Testing Gawk built with MPFR support should report 30 tests failed, and
if your ls.exe doesn't produce inode numbers consistent with the readdir
extension, you should see 31 failures.  If you see more failures, you
should investigate the reasons.

It is routine to install by hand, but note that the install target also
builds igawk.bat and igawk.cmd, which are used to add an include
facility to gawk (and which require sh).


Gawk thanks
-----------

We are indebted to Juan Grigera <juan@biophnet.unlp.edu.ar> for
additional help on changes for MS-Windows.

Support for MS-Windows started in gawk-3.0.3.