An
interpreted programming language that is included in most versions of
UNIX. The name is derived from the initials of its creators — Alfred
Aho, Peter
Weinberger, and Brian
Kernighan — who developed the language in 1977 and 1978. The language is particularly designed for filtering and manipulating textual data. In this respect, it is similar to
Perl, though Perl is more powerful.
There are many variants of awk, including gawk, which is the GNU version.