Hi Paul,
As I am sure you know, getting your arms around the scope of the project is the most fundamental question to ask (and to know) when looking at porting and testing the transformation of that software.
As a simple analogy, it's like asking someone to remodel a kitchen. All parties need to know the size of the kitchen, the cabinets, the appliances, the new features to add, the old features to remove, etc.
Having done this (migrated software and remodeled kitchens) a number of times in my long career, the first thing we should do is to identify all the files.
You replied:
That's all good information, but I think you would agree that it is good for both you and your company that someone should first take the initial step of performing an inventory of all the files and do the basic ground work.
If you have 'dead code', then of course that should be inventoried as well, no different than if we had a kitchen appliance which we did not use any more and were remodeling a kitchen. We need to do a basic inventory.
Hence, regardless of who ends up doing this work for you, the first step (if you want a good outcome) is to take an inventory of all the files which are a part of this "awk script" you mentioned, including all included files.
Cheers!
Footnote 1:
As you can imagine, we have a number of very talented awk programmers on our team, so the more information I can get about the scope of this project, the better I can match your project with the right team member.
Footnote 2:
I see that @Scrutinizer helped you before @paulgdavitt, but he is often not available for big projects due to his work schedule; so if we can get our arms around the exact scope of your project (number of files and lines in each file), that would be good for all parties.