B.2.3 Additional Configuration Options

There are several additional options you may use on the configure command line when compiling gawk from scratch, including:

--disable-extensions

Disable the extension mechanism within gawk. With this option, it is not possible to use dynamic extensions. This also disables configuring and building the sample extensions in the extension directory.

This option may be useful for cross-compiling. The default action is to dynamically check if the extensions can be configured and compiled.

--disable-lint

Disable all lint checking within gawk. The --lint and --lint-old options (see section Command-Line Options) are accepted, but silently do nothing. Similarly, setting the LINT variable (see section Built-in Variables That Control awk) has no effect on the running awk program.

When used with the GNU Compiler Collection’s (GCC’s) automatic dead-code-elimination, this option cuts almost 23K bytes off the size of the gawk executable on GNU/Linux x86_64 systems. Results on other systems and with other compilers are likely to vary. Using this option may bring you some slight performance improvement.

CAUTION: Using this option will cause some of the tests in the test suite to fail. This option may be removed at a later date.

--disable-mpfr

Skip checking for the MPFR and GMP libraries. This is useful mainly for the developers, to make sure nothing breaks if MPFR support is not available.

--disable-nls

Disable all message-translation facilities. This is usually not desirable, but it may bring you some slight performance improvement.

--enable-versioned-extension-dir

Use a versioned directory for extensions. The directory name will include the major and minor API versions in it. This makes it possible to keep extensions for different API versions on the same system without their conflicting with one another.

Use the command ‘./configure --help’ to see the full list of options supplied by configure.