DOS ain't dead - trip report: Duff AWK

trip report: Duff AWK (Miscellaneous)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 07.02.2026, 01:21

> I attempted to convert Duff AWK from Borland C & TASM to Watcom.

OpenWatcom used to have some small fascination with POSIX tools and bundled some sources, but I never looked too closely.

At the very least, Gunther K. (in 2010) built BWK's awk with OpenWatcom for 16-bit DOS. But I think it uses too small a stack, and it (rarely) runs out of memory on code where MAWK runs fine (and faster).

MAWK is faster and better, IMHO, but I test with both (and GAWK and maybe others). The 1996 DOS + OS/2 (MS C) build of MAWK was pretty bloated, so I rebuilt with TC++ and UPX'd it.

All of that should be on iBiblio for FreeDOS.

> The original build uses a small memory model. I found another build that
> uses a compact memory model so that it can better utilize conventional
> memory.

There was also an older (GNUish) build of MAWK that ran in small model.

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Complete thread:

trip report: Duff AWK - bencollver, 27.01.2026, 03:04 (Miscellaneous)
- trip report: Duff AWK - tkchia, 27.01.2026, 18:12
  - trip report: Duff AWK - bencollver, 27.01.2026, 19:08
- trip report: Duff AWK - Rugxulo, 07.02.2026, 01:21
  - trip report: Duff AWK - roytam, 10.02.2026, 07:17
    - trip report: Duff AWK - bencollver, 11.02.2026, 00:32