A year after the release of GNU Awk version 4.2.1, version 5.0.0 was released.
In the new version:
- Support for the POSIX printf %a and %A formats has been added.
- Improved test infrastructure. Simplified content of test/Makefile.am and now it is possible to generate pc/Makefile.tst from test/Makefile.in.
- Regex procedures have been replaced with procedures from GNULIB.
- Infrastructure updated: Bison 3.3, Automake 1.16.1, Gettext 0.19.8.1, makeinfo 6.5.
- Undocumented configuration options and related code that allowed non-Latin characters to be used in identifiers have been removed.
- The configuration option "--with-whiny-user-strftime" has been removed.
- The code now makes stronger assumptions about the C99 environment.
- PROCINFO["platform"] now outputs the platform that GNU Awk was compiled for.
- Writing elements that are not variable names to SYMTAB now results in a fatal error. This is a behavior change.
- Comment handling in pretty-printer has been redesigned almost entirely from scratch. As a result, now fewer comments are lost.
- Namespaces introduced. You can no longer do this: gawk -e 'BEGIN {' -e 'print "hello" }'.
- GNU Awk is now locale-sensitive when ignoring case in single-byte locales instead of hardcoded Latin-1.
- Fixed a lot of bugs.
Source: linux.org.ru