An interesting question! But this is not a traditional answer. I have numerous comments that won't fit well into the S.O. comment format, so please forgive this violation of etiquette.
As much as I like *awk, I can see several obstacles.
**1.** I'm not aware of any CMS tools created with nawk. I have a wide range of experience of what is available with awk, and as you've discovered, there are several, (TinyTim and Blis), but they're based on bash/gawk and they're not as fully featured as you require.
When I went to the mother-ship of awk (
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), I got the distinct impression that the site has been hacked. I did find **[A tiny CMS in awk][1]** , but assume it is a gawk based system. The two sites have related authors, so I'm afraid it may be hacked too. Beware!
**2.** It sounds like you are thinking of a traditional awk command-line and shell script based system. If so, my limited experience with CMS systems has been that they are GUI based systems for content creation and management, so a GUI page creator, AND THEN a GUI wrapper around something similar to a traditional unix repository/SCCS system. CMS experts are welcome to enumerate the differences.
So, why not just make some wrapper scripts around CVS or similar that allow you to control your repository as you need?
**3.** System effectiveness I: using CVS as a place holder for the repository side of your CMS system, think how big that source code is, and that it is written in 'C', which gives much finer access and control to sub-systems related to file ownership and security issues (as well as many others) than you can access in nawk or any shell. (Compiled C executes much faster of course, but in this day of 3Ghz+ processors, it's not an absolute requirement to insist on complied code)
**4.** system effectiveness II: You say you want to store mostly XHTML 1.0/CSS type files. That is a major set-back for your project, awk is reg-ex based language and can't effectively parse XML-like data. Have you lurked enough here to have read [parse xml in bash][2] OR [complex conversions][3]
Of course, the post I was really looking for, I can't find! Search for phrases like 'friends don't let friends do XML in sed/awk/bash' ;-)!
**5.** Re TinyTim and Blis: Reconsider your objection to gawk/bash: these 2 excellent languages are super-sets of nawk and ksh(88). Depending on how little/much the script rely on gawk/bash specific features, at the easy end, you may only need to change the 'she-bang' at the top of the file to #!/bin/nawk , #!/bin/ksh OR more realistically, make that change and then rewrite some code for nawk/ksh. Worst case is that the gawk and bash code rely so heavily on specific 'branded' features that is really impractical to rewrite. It's worth a look.
To complete the picture, also see [gawkxml][4].
Obviously a gawk system, but I did make a conversion to nawk with some code changes. It worked for my needs, but I didn't try to fix the case of the self-verifying aspect of the code that didn't work ;-(
**EDIT**
**6.** Finally, look at the range of systems from the original awk creators in their classic book 'The Awk Programming Language', Chap 4 Reports and Databases, 'A relational database system' AND Chap. 6, Little Languages. There may be ideas there for you (no prebaked CMS however ;-).
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So, given that perl and python both have good-to-great XML processing built-in via imported modules, I think you have to seriously consider them OR install something like xmlstarlet (per the S.O. links above) and write your shell system wrappers to work with it.
I hope this helps.
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[4]:
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