1. Introduction Libmawk is a fork of mawk 1.3.3, restructured for embedding. This means the user gets libmawk.h and libmawk.so and can embed awk scripting language in any application written in C. For more information, check out the web page at http://repo.hu/projects/libmawk and the documentation in doc/. 2. Requirements and compiling ANSI C compiler, POSIX shell and make are required for compiling libmawk. Bison should be installed for developing libmawk; if it is not installed, local changes to the grammar will be ingored. ./configure; make On top of usual scconfig arguments, ./configure accepts --numeric=TYPE, where TYPE is int or double. Default is double. This switch affects what type libmawk stores numbers in. 3. installation Run "make install" or "make linstall". The linstall version will use symlinks instead of actual copying of files which is useful if you develop libmawk, the library itself. 4. Compatibility with mawk Compatibility with mawk is maintained to some degree. Currently libmawk offers a small set of extra features on awk level while providing everything that mawk provides. A valid mawk script will work with libmawk/lmawk without modification. However, the new features will work only with libmawk/lmawk and not mawk, so portable scripts shouldn't depend on them. All extensions are clearly marked in the manual. Conclusion: libmawk will compile and install mawk executable, which is backward compatible with mawk executable but also adds some extension features. Awklib depends on one of the libmawk features (include), thus awklib scripts won't work with other awk implementations without tweaking.