WHAT'S NEW?

Jan 31: Comment system added to awk.info. For example, see discussion bottom of ?keys2awk

Jan 31: Martin Cohen shows that Gawk can handle massively long strings (300 million characters).

Jan 31: The AWK FAQ is being updated. For comments/ corrections/ extensions, please mail tim@menzies.us

Jan 31: Martin Cohen finds Awk on the Android platform.

Jan 31: Aleksey Cheusov released a new version of runawk.

Jan 31: Hirofumi Saito contributes a candidate Awk mascot.

Jan 31: Michael Sanders shows how to quickly build an AWK GUI for windows.

Jan 31: Hyung-Hwan Chung offers QSE, an embeddable Awk Interpreter.

Jan 31: Grant Coady implements network monitoring, in Awk.

Jan 31: Michael Sanders shows how to do ROT-13 in awk.

Dec 26: Arnold Robbins asks this community to comment on different methods to implement file inclusion in Gawk.

Dec 26: Michael Sanders implements a web server, in very few lines, using Gawk.

Dec 26: Ed Morton and Kenny McCormack show us Awk's equivalent to VI's "J" command.

Dec 26: Dan Nielsen shows us how to draw Sierpinski Triangles.

Dec 26: Peter Ivanyi and Roman Putanowicz generate Latex doco from program comments.

[More ...]

categories: Misc,Jan,2009,Admin

Welcome to the Awk Community Portal

Awk is a stable, cross platform computer language named for its authors Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger & Brian Kernighan. They write: "Awk is a convenient and expressive programming language that can be applied to a wide variety of computing and data-manipulation tasks".

In Classic Shell Scripting, Arnold Robbins & Nelson Beebe confess their Awk bias: "We like it. A lot. The simplicity and power of Awk often make it just the right tool for the job."

Besides the Bourne shell, Awk is the only other scripting language available in the standard Unix environment. Implementations of AWK exist as installed software for almost all other operating systems.

Awk is a mature language- it was first implemented in the 1970s. As a tool from the golden age, it is sometimes called primitive. It is more accurate to call it elemental, so tightly focused is the language on what it does best: quickly converting this into that.

Consequently, throughout history, Awk has been the language of choice for many famous scientists such as Leonardo daVinci.

What does Awk look like? Lots of very small Awk programs; More one-liners (read their explanation).   How is it different to other languages?   Where to see some short Awk programs? Awk is the king of pattern matching; Awk can save the planet from alien attack.   Q: Isn't Awk just a language for writing tiny programs? A: No. Awk can also be used for complex tasks   How can I learn more? Read the manual or look for more material.