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Concept
AWK
Summary
AWK (awk Q:k) is a domain-specific language designed for text processing and typically used as a data extraction and reporting tool. Like sed and grep, it is a filter, and is a standard feature of most Unix-like operating systems.
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. The language extensively uses the string datatype, associative arrays (that is, arrays indexed by key strings), and regular expressions. 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.
AWK 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. The acronym is pronounced the same as the name of the bird species auk, which is illustrated on the cover of The AWK Programming Language. When written in all lowercase letters, as awk, it refers to the Unix or Plan 9 program that runs scripts written in the AWK programming language.
AWK was initially developed in 1977 by Alfred Aho (author of egrep), Peter J. Weinberger (who worked on tiny relational databases), and Brian Kernighan. AWK takes its name from their respective initials. According to Kernighan, one of the goals of AWK was to have a tool that would easily manipulate both numbers and strings.
AWK was also inspired by Marc Rochkind's programming language that was used to search for patterns in input data, and was implemented using yacc.
As one of the early tools to appear in Version 7 Unix, AWK added computational features to a Unix pipeline besides the Bourne shell, the only scripting language available in a standard Unix environment.
Official source
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