awk

1. tool, language (Named from the authors' initials) An

interpreted language included with many versions of Unix for

massaging text data, developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger,

and Brian Kernighan in 1978. It is characterised by C-like

syntax, declaration-free variables, associative arrays, and

field-oriented text processing.

There is a GNU version called gawk and other varients

including bawk, mawk, nawk, tawk. Perl was inspired

in part by awk but is much more powerful.

Unix manual page: awk(1).

netlib WWW. netlibFTP .

["The AWK Programming Language" A. Aho, B. Kernighan,

P. Weinberger, A-W 1988].

2. jargon An expression which is awkward to manipulate

through normal regexp facilities, for example, one

containing a newline.

[Jargon File]

(1995-10-06)