

ĪWK was created at Bell Labs in the 1970s, and its name is derived from the surnames of its authors: Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan. While AWK has a limited intended application domain and was especially designed to support one-liner programs, the language is Turing-complete, and even the early Bell Labs users of AWK often wrote well-structured large AWK programs. The language extensively uses the string datatype, associative arrays (that is, arrays indexed by key strings), and regular expressions. The AWK language is a data-driven scripting language consisting of a set of actions to be taken against streams of textual data – either run directly on files or used as part of a pipeline – for purposes of extracting or transforming text, such as producing formatted reports. Like sed and grep, it is a filter, and is a standard feature of most Unix-like operating systems. Tcl, AMPL, Perl, Korn Shell ( ksh93, dtksh, tksh), LuaĪWK ( awk) is a domain-specific language designed for text processing and typically used as a data extraction and reporting tool. Old awk oawk 1977, new awk nawk 1985, GNU Awk gawk None can handle strings, integers and floating-point numbers regular expressionsĪwk, GNU Awk, mawk, nawk, MKS AWK, Thompson AWK (compiler), Awka (compiler)
