In 2008 Volker updated his gawk.exe port to version 3.1.6, thanks.

Hi, gawk-win.zip is a quick and dirty "minimal" gawk archive for Win32,
I've only tested it with Windows 2000.  If you're already using Cygwin
and/or GnuWin tools this is NOT what you want, please get the official
distribution:  <http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gawk.htm>

When I tried this (2007-07) I ended up with about 6 MB of manuals in
various flavours (HTML, PDF, PS, info, dvi, chm, txt) and numerous
directories, manifests, locales, and what else, more or less unrelated
to my goal "just run gawk".  The binary gawk.exe in this distribution
was version 3.1.3, less than 400 KB, plus two additional DLLs.

The instructions how to run gawk on Windows were incomplete at best,
maybe they assume that you have and want bash (a command line shell).

The GnuWin32 gawk uninstall.exe worked without problems.  After that
I asked Google for "gawk.exe windows" and got another proposal:

        <http://freenet-homepage.de/vkiefel/gawk-3.1.6-win32.zip>

In <http://freenet-homepage.de/vkiefel/software.html> the author says
that this gawk port is based on the <http://www.mingw.org> compiler -
I've no clue what it is, but the gawk.exe binary is certainly smaller
(270 KB) than the GnuWin32 version, it doesn't come with additional
DLLs, and it's version 3.1.6 instead of 3.1.3.

Otherwise it has the same issue with running awk-scripts specified on
the command line, something with double vs. single quotes (W2K and OS/2
cmd.exe shells use double quotes to delimit command line arguments).

Volker's archive with only two binaries (gawk.exe and pgawk.exe) might
be a bit too minimalistic, therefore I decided to add two files found
in the GnuWin32 package:

   gawk.1.txt - plain text version of gawk.1 (the gawk manual page)
   gawk.chm   - Windows help file (includes the GNU license text)

What they don't tell you in simple words is how to install gawk.exe on
a Windows system.  Maybe it's obvious:  Put gawk.exe (and its profiling
pgawk.exe variant) in a directory of your "path".  If you've no clue
what your path is go to a command line prompt and input "path".

On the box where I'm writing this I get this result for my path:

PATH=C:\WINNT\system32;C:\WINNT;C:\WINNT\System32\Wbem;
     C:\Programme\ooRexx;C:\Programme\Quicktime\QTSystem\;
     C:\Programme\bin;

Actually all in one line, various directories separated by semicolons.
Stay away from WINNT for W2K or WINDOWS for XP directories, pick one
of the Programs (German: Programme) directories.  Ideally you have a
directory for "miscellaneous binaries", in my case C:\Programme\bin,
copy gawk.exe + pgawk.exe into this directory.

How to add a new "bin" directory to the "path":

  Otherwise create a new "bin" directory (folder) below C:\Programs or
  C:\Programme, and copy the gawk binaries into it.  After that you've
  to add this directory to the "path", that's a list of directories
  where Windows looks for binaries.  One way to do this is to open the
  properties of "My Computer" (German: Arbeitsplatz), right click on
  "My Computer" and select properties.  Under the rightmost "Extended"
  (German: Erweitert) tab pick "Environment Variables" (German name:
   "Umgebungsvariablen").

  Below "system variables" you'll find the "path", pick "modify".  Add
  the new directory at the end, e.g. C:\Programme\bin; with semicolon,
  press "Ok" (twice), ready.  Close the old command line window, and
  open a new command line window, enter "path", and now you should see
  your new augmented "path".

Enter "gawk --version" to check the version, it should be 3.1.6.  Now
you're ready to run awk-scripts by third parties with gawk -f script.
I've added a awkpath.awk script for a first sanity test:

  gawk -f awkpath.awk

This command resulted in the compiled default AWKPATH value:

  .;c:/lib/awk;c:/gnu/lib/awk

The dot "." means "anything in the current working directory", it's
okay.  If you intend to work with functions defined in external awk
files in other directories you have several options:

  1: create a directory c:\lib\awk     \/ collect external awk files
  2: create a directory c:\gnu\lib\awk /\ in the created directories
  3: create or modify enviroment variable AWKPATH

I picked option (3) creating a new system variable AWKPATH, almost
the same procedure as explained above for the PATH.  If you want to
see the current AWKPATH you've to say "set awkpath".  Don't forget to
close and reopen the command line window to get the new environment.

Testing the effect (I picked .;c:\programme\bin\awk) with the script:

  gawk -f awkpath.awk

New result (compare the old result above):

  .;c:\programme\bin\awk

Finally I checked if those backslashes work, after all gawk is a UNIX
tool.  For this test I moved (copy + delete) the test script into the
new c:\programme\bin\awk directory.

  gawk -f .\awkpath.awk

This fails now, there's no awkpath.awk in the actual directory anymore.

  gawk -f awkpath.awk

Scripts in any directory of the AWKPATH work as expected.
