AWK Resources by Predrag

What is AWK?

AWK is an expressive scripting programming language that can be applied to a wide variety of computing and data-manipulation tasks created at Bell Labs in the 1970s. Its name is derived from the family names of its authors: Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan. It 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. AWK is one of the early tools to appear in Version 7 of Unix and gained popularity as a way to add computational features to a Unix pipeline. A version of the AWK language is a standard feature of nearly every modern Unix-like operating system available today. Even though AWK can be used on computers running the Windows family of operating systems, either as a stand-alone program (Gawk for Win) or via Cygwin, some familiarity with the Unix operating system is necessary. Before we continue further, the author of this web page would like to state for the record that he is an avid OpenBSD user, so he neither uses nor is familiar with a GNU version (Gawk) of the AWK programming language. This is also not a tutorial on the AWK programming language. Those who would like to learn AWK should look at the resources.

Downloads

I have put together some of the more useful AWK scripts that I have made over the years in the hopes that you may find them useful. The easiest way to run these scripts is to put them in a folder and then adjust permissions and the environment variable ($PATH).

Slides

AWK Resources

AWK Tutorials

Books about AWK