Tests for program presence, such as those formerly embedded in the
top-level Makefile for gawk and gsed, are better suited for autoconf.
Note that it is not sufficient to merely export AWK and SED environment
variables, as packages may still directly invoke awk(1) and sed(1) with
non-standard features independent of the autotools framework.
Wrapper scripts therefore remain necessary, although these are now
generated by the configure script to avoid hard-coded paths.
Do not assume the existence of /bin/bash on all systems.
Scott Johnson
Palmer Dabbelt
Albert Ou
Andrew Waterman