AWK programming language

AWK is a computer pattern/action language that can be used for data analysis, manipulation and simple reporting. It is one of the early tools to appear in Version 3 UNIX and gained popularity as a way to add computational features to a UNIX pipeline. The name AWK is derived from the surnames of its authors -- Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, and Peter J. Weinberger[?].

A version of AWK is a standard feature of nearly every modern unix-like operating system available today. The most common versions are listed at [1] (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook/).

Awk is an example of a programming language that extensively uses the string datatype, associative arrays (that is, arrays indexed by key strings), and regular expressions.

A free GNU version of awk is named gawk[?]. Documentation and downloads are available at [2] (http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/gawk.html).

The power, terseness, and limitations of AWK programs and sed scripts inspired Larry Wall to write Perl.