This note is to announce the BETA release of GNU Awk 5.3.0.

It is available from:

http://www.skeeve.com/gawk/gawk-5.2.63.tar.gz

This is a major release.

The important part of the NEWS file is below.

As far as I can tell, the documentation and code have both hit the
freeze point.

So, why do a beta release? So that you, yes you, the end user, can see
if anything I've done breaks gawk for you. Then you can TELL ME ABOUT
IT so that I can fix it for the final release.

Thanks,

Arnold Robbins
arnold@skeeve.com
---------------------------------------------
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Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
notice and this notice are preserved.

Changes from 5.2.x to 5.3.0
---------------------------

1. Infrastructure changes: Removed the use of libsigsegv. The
value-add was never very much and it caused problems in some
environments.

2. In keeping with new features in BWK awk, gawk now has built-in
CSV file parsing. The behavior is intended to be identical to
that of the "One True AWK" when --csv is applied. See the
manual for details.

3. Also in keeping with BWK awk, gawk now supports a new \u escape
sequence. This should be followed by 1-8 hexadecimal digits. The
given code point is converted to its corresponding multibyte encoding
for storage inside gawk. See the manual.

4. If PROCINFO["BUFFERPIPE"] exists, then pipe output is buffered.
You can also use PROCINFO["command", "BUFFERPIPE"]. See the manual
for details.

5. Because of the additional `do_csv' variable in the API, which breaks
binary compatibility, the API major version was updated to 4 and
the minor version was reset to zero. The API remains source code
compatible; that is, existing extensions should only require recompilation.

6. The manual now requires Texinfo 7.1 and its texinfo.tex for formatting.
As a result, we no longer need to pre-process it, removing the need
for gawktexi.in and leaving just gawk.texi.

7. And of course, there have been several minor code cleanups and bug fixes.
See the ChangeLog for details.

Changes from 5.2.2 to 5.2.x
---------------------------

1. The readdir extension has been updated with additonal code and
features, see the manual or its man page. As a result, the
readdir_test.c extension has been removed.

2. We have a new translation: Ukranian.

3. Several subtle issues related to null regexp matches around
multibyte characters have been fixed.
--
Aharon (Arnold) Robbins arnold AT skeeve DOT com