gawkinet: Preface

1 
1 Preface
1 *******
1 
1 In May of 1997, Ju"rgen Kahrs felt the need for network access from
1 'awk', and, with a little help from me, set about adding features to do
1 this for 'gawk'.  At that time, he wrote the bulk of this Info file.
1 
1    The code and documentation were added to the 'gawk' 3.1 development
1 tree, and languished somewhat until I could finally get down to some
1 serious work on that version of 'gawk'.  This finally happened in the
1 middle of 2000.
1 
1    Meantime, Ju"rgen wrote an article about the Internet special files
1 and '|&' operator for 'Linux Journal', and made a networking patch for
1 the production versions of 'gawk' available from his home page.  In
1 August of 2000 (for 'gawk' 3.0.6), this patch also made it to the main
1 GNU 'ftp' distribution site.
1 
1    For release with 'gawk', I edited Ju"rgen's prose for English grammar
1 and style, as he is not a native English speaker.  I also rearranged the
1 material somewhat for what I felt was a better order of presentation,
1 and (re)wrote some of the introductory material.
1 
1    The majority of this document and the code are his work, and the high
1 quality and interesting ideas speak for themselves.  It is my hope that
1 these features will be of significant value to the 'awk' community.
1 
1 
1 Arnold Robbins
1 Nof Ayalon, ISRAEL
1 March, 2001
1