An interpretedprogramming language that is included in most versions of UNIX. The name is derived from the initials of its creators -- Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan -- who developed the language in 1977 and 1978. The language is particularly designed for filtering and manipulating textual data. In this respect, it is similar to Perl, though Perl is more powerful.
There are many variants of awk, including gawk, which is the GNU version.
GAWK Manual Online manual for GAWK, the GNU implmentation of AWK.
UNIX utilities - awk Includes information on the general structure of awk scripts as well as elementary and advanced programming information with examples.
