[bug-gawk] Suggestion for Manual re: Sec. 2.5.2 The AWKLIBPATH Environment Variable

[Neil R. Ormos]

It appears that changing the value of
ENVIRON["AWKLIBPATH"] while a gawk program is
running does not have an effect on where gawk
searches for extensions.

I suggest a comment to this effect be placed in
section 2.5.2.

There is a comment in Sec. 2.5.1 explaining the
analogous lack of effect of changing AWKPATH:

|> Although you can change ENVIRON["AWKPATH"]
|> within your awk program, this has no effect on
|> the running program's behavior. This makes
|> sense: the AWKPATH environment variable is used
|> to find the program source files. Once your
|> program is running, all the files have been
|> found, and gawk no longer needs to use AWKPATH.

although I'm not sure that the "this makes sense"
rationale equally applies to AWKLIBPATH, since a
user might conceivably seek to load an extension
from a location not foreseen at the time gawk is
invoked.

Best regards,

--Neil Ormos