Awk was developed in 1977 at Bell Labs, and it's still a remarkably useful tool for solving a wide variety of problems quickly and efficiently. In this update of the classic Awk book, the creators of the language show you what Awk can do and teach you how to use it effectively.

Here's what programmers today are saying: "I love Awk." "Awk is amazing." "It is just so damn good." "Awk is just right." "Awk is awesome." "Awk has always been a language that I loved."

It's easy: "Simple, fast and lightweight." "Absolutely efficient to learn because there isn't much to learn." "3-4 hours to learn the language from start to finish." "I can teach it to new engineers in less than 2 hours."

It's productive: "Whenever I need to do a complex analysis of a semi-structured text file in less than a minute, Awk is my tool." "Learning Awk was the best bang for buck investment of time in my entire career." "Designed to chew through lines of text files with ease, with great defaults that minimize the amount of code you actually have to write to do anything."

It's always available: "AWK runs everywhere." "A reliable Swiss Army knife that is always there when you need it." "Many systems lack Perl or Python, but include Awk."

Table of Contents

1. An AwkTutorial

2. Awk in Action

3. Exploratory Data Analysis

4. Data Processing

5. Reports and Databases

6. Processing Words

7. Little Languages

8. Experiments with Algorithms

9. Epilogue

A Comprehensive Guide to Mastering Awk: From Basics to Advanced Applications

This book aims to teach effective usage of Awk. Chapter 1 offers a quick start tutorial for writing basic Awk programs. The subsequent chapters showcase various practical Awk applications, from personal programming in Chapter 2 to data analysis in Chapter 3, and data manipulation in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 delves into managing personal databases and generating reports, while Chapter 6 explores text generation and document preparation. Chapter 7 discusses specialized "little languages" and Chapter 8 delves into algorithm expression using Awk. Chapter 9 provides insights into Awk's history and performance comparisons. Appendix A serves as the reference manual for the Awk language. Start with Chapter 1, explore chapters of interest independently, and consult the reference manual as needed for detailed information.

On Thursday, 29 June 2023, Alfred V Aho wrote:

Bob Martin has been keeping track of thousands of research papers that have been written on the Coronavirus. He was trying to summarize where the papers he cited were published, but had lots of problems doing the summarization in Word. He finally asked me to write an Awk program to capture the statistics. It just took four lines of Awk.

In response he said: "UNIX vs Word is winning. I tried about a dozen Word to Text conversion ideas from the web. NONE worked. Most frustrating."

He looked at 8,558 papers from 283 sources. In his monthly journal he wrote:

"The monthly addition rate is influenced by various events, e.g., vaccinations and Omicron, and more importantly by changes in the particular journals that I read.In the beginning of my bizarre hobby, I found most of the papers and journals from the Coronavirus section of an aggregator called News, Medical Life Sciences. Each paper took a long time to read as I didn’t know the relevant fields such as epidemiology and virology and was stumped by the astoundingly arcane vocabulary. The aggregator published about 30 papers a day and I was challenged to finish them by late afternoon.Early on, I subscribed to Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine.Next, I reviewed Lancet and the Journal of the American Medical Association papers.

"About 4 months ago, I expanded my daily review to 20 journal families which encompass a couple of hundred journals. The aggregator that was my early sole source results in only a paper or two a day to/The Mouse That Roared/ from the half a dozen they now publish daily.It takes me a couple of hours to go through the papers each day since I know the relevant fields and vocabulary.The papers that are published now are mainly about Long Coronavirus, second generation vaccines, therapeutics, pandemic medical impacts, and comorbidities/biochemical predictors. Thanks to Al Aho for his patient help in producing the Awk program for the data in this chart."

I think Brian is right on target when he says Awk is excellent for producing summary statistics.

PS. Martin never does anything in half measures.

About the Authors

Alfred V. Aho is Lawrence Gussman Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Columbia University, and former department chair. Well known for his work on algorithms, data structures, programming languages, compilers, and the foundations of computer science, he has received the ACM A. M. Turing Award and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal.

Brian W. Kernighan was a member of the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Labs and is currently a professor in the Computer Science department at Princeton. He is the co-creator of several programming languages and the co-author of numerous books, including the computing classic, The C Programming Language.

Peter J. Weinberger, currently at Google, has served as chief technology officer at Renaissance Technologies and as leader of computer science research at Bell Labs. He is a Fellow of the AAAS.