After you have extracted the gawk distribution, cd to gawk-3.1.4. Like most GNU software, gawk is configured automatically for your Unix system by running the configure program. This program is a Bourne shell script that is generated automatically using GNU autoconf. (The autoconf software is described fully in Autoconf—Generating Automatic Configuration Scripts, which is available from the Free Software Foundation.)
To configure gawk, simply run configure:
sh ./configure
This produces a Makefile and config.h tailored to your system.
The config.h file describes various facts about your system.
You might want to edit the Makefile to
change the CFLAGS variable, which controls
the command-line options that are passed to the C compiler (such as
optimization levels or compiling for debugging).
Alternatively, you can add your own values for most make
variables on the command line, such as CC and CFLAGS, when
running configure:
CC=cc CFLAGS=-g sh ./configure
See the file INSTALL in the gawk distribution for all the details.
After you have run configure and possibly edited the Makefile, type:
make
Shortly thereafter, you should have an executable version of gawk. That's all there is to it! To verify that gawk is working properly, run `make check'. All of the tests should succeed. If these steps do not work, or if any of the tests fail, check the files in the README_d directory to see if you've found a known problem. If the failure is not described there, please send in a bug report (see Bugs.)