AWKLIBPATH Variable (The GNU Awk User’s Guide)
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2.5.2 The AWKLIBPATH Environment Variable
The AWKLIBPATH
environment variable is similar to the AWKPATH
variable, but it is used to search for loadable extensions (stored as system shared libraries) specified with the -l
option rather than for source files. If the extension is not found, the path is searched again after adding the appropriate shared library suffix for the platform. For example, on GNU/Linux systems, the suffix ‘.so
’ is used. The search path specified is also used for extensions loaded via the @load
keyword (see section Loading Dynamic Extensions into Your Program).
If AWKLIBPATH
does not exist in the environment, or if it has an empty value, gawk
uses a default path; this is typically ‘/usr/local/lib/gawk
’, although it can vary depending upon how gawk
was built.15
See section Shell Startup Files, for information on functions that help to manipulate the AWKLIBPATH
variable.
gawk
places the value of the search path that it used into ENVIRON["AWKLIBPATH"]
. This provides access to the actual search path value from within an awk
program.
Although you can change ENVIRON["AWKLIBPATH"]
within your awk
program, this has no effect on the running program’s behavior. This makes sense: the AWKLIBPATH
environment variable is used to find any requested extensions, and they are loaded before the program starts to run. Once your program is running, all the extensions have been found, and gawk
no longer needs to use AWKLIBPATH
.
Footnotes
(15)
Your version of gawk
may use a different directory; it will depend upon how gawk
was built and installed. The actual directory is the value of $(pkgextensiondir)
generated when gawk
was configured. (For more detail, see the INSTALL
file in the source distribution, and see Compiling gawk for Unix-Like Systems. You probably don’t need to worry about this, though.)