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List of Names
Short Form
Full Form
- Awk
- Language type:
D - Database or Text-processing
- Description:
Awk is an interpreted string-processing
language developed at Bell Labs in the
early 1970s. It quickly assumed its
place as the utility language of choice
for small UNIX data transformation and
parsing programs. Awk offered powerful
regular expression pattern matching, handy
line-oriented program structure, and enough
conventional language features to let you
get your work done. Awk did not support
any kind of modularity nor type checking.
In a typical Awk program, sections of code
are applied to lines of data input as
matched by regular expressions. Later
versions of Awk supported multiple input
files as well as subroutines and other
advanced features.
A version of 'new' awk (circa 1985) is
supplied with most UNIX systems. The
most powerful and portable awk implementation
is GAWK (Gnu Awk), available from the Free
Software Foundation. Awk is a part of
the POSIX Command Language and Utilities
standard.
- Origin:
Aho, Kernighan, & Weinberger, 1976-77
- See Also:
- Remarks:
Awk remains moderately well-known in the
UNIX community, but has been largely
superseded by the more powerful Perl
programming language.
Awk is reputed to be one of the best
languages in which to write a program
that will be incomprehensible to any
reader, even its own author.
- Links:
-
-
- Date:
- Sample code:
BEGIN {
if ("'$#argv'"==1) Col="'$1'"; else Col=1
}
{Total = $Col; };
END {
printf "Total for column %d with %d items: %d\n",
Col,NR,Total
}
Descriptions in this dictionary are ©1997-99 Neal Ziring. Some
examples copyright of their respective authors. Some
technologies and languages are trademarked. Permission to
copy descriptions is granted as long as authorship credit is preserved.
Comments on this dictionary, corrections and suggestions, are all welcome.
Please use email, the address is ziring@home.com
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Dictionary and script maintained by Neal Ziring, last major modifications 3/18/98. Most recent
additions to dictionary and master list, 1/00.