Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a unix system that only has AWK to program with which hooks up to a windows or linux based system with all progamming and software capabilities. The link between the systems is typically a 9600 baud TTY port on the AWK system and COM1 on the other system. I can cat <filenm> from the unix system and use the capture mode in Procomm to save the data (or logfile when using Putty) but then have to delete the prompts and input data. I would like something like Kermit but written with AWK on the unix system since that is all that is available. I have binary data (from compressing the large ascii files) and od -x that file to make an ascii file to transfer now. I could still just transferr ascii the file but would like to be able to do binary data if possible. The unix system will never have anything but AWK to use for this.

Any idea if it could be done and how? Thanks.

Any ideas

I do not know how to do this, a priori.

This makes very little sense to me. But, I do have a question. I cannot understand why there is nothing but awk over there. How could the remote machine provide any value or any service if it cannot do anything but awk? How does the remote box do anything useful? -- is the real question.

Or is this awk-only setup some sort of a security feature? You do have to have a shell to do anything useful with awk anyway. And you have to have a C runtime to make awk work.

awk does not have all the features you need to make comm software. At the very least you'll need stty to set the baud rate and data mode on the port before you dump raw awk output into it.

it's a security feature. It only has a limited number of shell commands available. It doesn't even have "head" or some other of the standard shell commands. Thanks for your response.

you might have better luck with gawk, but still it might be painful....