gath

[barbara.tongue]

Folks,

In one of the tools directoryies on my machine, I discovered
the executable "gath."  Now, from what I've heard, gath is a
tool which "gathers" files, allows shell execution if lines
are prefaced with ~$, and can be used in combination with
troffed files.  Here is my question -

Let's say that I have dynamic flat-file database, whose fields
can be any combination of 17 variables.  I want to pipe that
into troff and get out a clean table with the headers correctly
inserted.  With definite input, that is no problem; for example,
I've written into my .tbl file what the header names are and
in what file the data is located.  The problem occurs when I
want to switch to using $1 as my file name; the command

	gath file.tbl file.data 

defines $1 as null.  (I'm calling $1 from file.tbl; I assume
that in itself is a problem.)

Does anyone know where the source code can be found?

I have no man page for this executable; can anyone help?

Much, much *much* thanks in advance,
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