What is AWK?

Now that I am writing about AWK I thought I should start off with a descriptive definition of this language. (See full description here):



awk is a simple and elegant pattern scanning and processing language. It was created in late 70th of the last century. The name was composed from the initial letters of three original authors Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, and Peter J. Weinberger. It is commonly used as a command-line filter in pipes to reformat the output of other commands. It's the precursor and the main inspiration of Perl. Although originated in Unix it is available and widely used in Windows environment too. It takes two inputs: data file and command file. The command file can be absent and necessary commands can be passed as augments. As Ronald P. Loui aptly noted awk is very underappreciated language:

what language we use in our undergraduate AI programming class. That's understandable. We use GAWK. GAWK, Gnu's version of Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan's old pattern scanning language isn't even viewed as a programming language by most people. Like PERL and TCL, most prefer to view it as a "scripting language." It has no objects; it is
not functional; it does no built-in logic programming. Their surprise turns to puzzlement when I confide that (a) while the students are allowed to use any language they want; (b) with a single exception, the best work consistently results from those working in GAWK. (footnote: The exception was a PASCAL programmer who is now an NSF graduate fellow getting a Ph.D. in mathematics at Harvard.) Programmers in C, C++, and LISP haven't
even been close (we have not seen work in PROLOG or JAVA).

The main advantage of AWK is that unlike Perl and other "scripting monsters" that it is very slim without feature creep so characteristic of Perl and thus it can be very efficiently used with pipes. Also it has rather simple, clean syntax and like much heavier TCL can be used with C for "dual-language" implementions.