Reporting Problems and Bugs

If you have problems with gawk or think that you have found a bug, please report it to the developers; we cannot promise to do anything but we might well want to fix it.

Before reporting a bug, make sure you have actually found a real bug. Carefully reread the documentation and see if it really says you can do what you're trying to do. If it's not clear whether you should be able to do something or not, report that too; it's a bug in the documentation!

Before reporting a bug or trying to fix it yourself, try to isolate it to the smallest possible awk program and input data file that reproduces the problem. Then send us the program and data file, some idea of what kind of Unix system you're using, and the exact results gawk gave you. Also say what you expected to occur; this will help us decide whether the problem was really in the documentation.

Once you have a precise problem, send e-mail to (Internet) bug-gnu- or (UUCP) mit-eddie!prep.ai.mit.edu!bug-gnu-utils. Please include the version number of gawk you are using. You can get this information with the command gawk -W version '{}' /dev/null. You should send carbon copies of your mail to David Trueman at , and to Arnold Robbins, who can be reached at . David is most likely to fix code problems, while Arnold is most likely to fix documentation problems.

Non-bug suggestions are always welcome as well. If you have questions about things that are unclear in the documentation or are just obscure features, ask Arnold Robbins; he will try to help you out, although he may not have the time to fix the problem. You can send him electronic mail at the Internet address above.

If you find bugs in one of the non-Unix ports of gawk, please send an electronic mail message to the person who maintains that port. They are listed below, and also in the README file in the gawk distribution. Information in the README file should be considered authoritative if it conflicts with this manual.

The people maintaining the non-Unix ports of gawk are:

MS-DOS The port to MS-DOS is maintained by Scott Deifik. His electronic mail address is .

VMS The port to VAX VMS is maintained by Pat Rankin. His electronic mail address is .

Atari ST The port to the Atari ST is maintained by Michal Jaegermann. His electronic mail address is .

If your bug is also reproducible under Unix, please send copies of your report to the general GNU bug list, as well as to Arnold Robbins and David Trueman, at the addresses listed above.