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The AWK Programming Language

by Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan  Peter J. Weinberger

See the introduction to the series for more information

AWK is an elegant pattern scanning and processing language that was an important inspiration for later languages. It is well-suited for small projects involving text processing or formatting, and has some useful features for small database applications. Its features for pattern description are derived from those of the grep family of standard Unix tools. Awk is one of the early tools to appear in Version 3 UNIX and gained popularity as a way to add computational features to a UNIX pipeline. Unfortunately it was never fully integrated into shell and that created a lot of problems with using Unix programming environment that otherwise would be neatly solved.

This book contains the original description of Awk written by the authors. The clarity of description of concepts and tradeoffs make this book a classic. See also The AWK Programming Language

• Textbook Binding: 210 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.44 x 9.22 x 6.26
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co; (January 1988)
• ISBN: 020107981X

10 Stars, April 2, 2002     Reviewer: Ramesh B Kanagaraj (see more about me) from Euless, Texas United States I wish I can give 10 stars for this book. This is a bible.

The awk bible a must have tome for all Unix power scripters, October 25, 2000     Reviewer: A reader from Seattle I second the feeling here, this awk book is the most concise, clear and useful scripting book on unix period with the exception of perl. Its also a job life saver. At work we can't use perl on our unix servers because of management attitudes so awk and sh are the only tools to script with. Become a Unix power scripter with this cool book!

AWK abundance, May 14, 2000     Reviewer: Per Kistler (see more about me) from Zurich, Switzerland This small book is packed with relevant tutorial material and examples about AWK (nawk). Since nawk is the only thing besides KSH which one has available on every UNIX system, it is absolutely essential to have a good handling of it. At many places one is not allowed to use Perl/Tcl/Python, but AWK they cannot take away, because the system needs it. And this book is the only one which presents awk in it's full power. It contains a concise reference at the end, which is very helpful. Although gawk can do more and has a nice book, it is so, that if one can install gawk, one can as well install perl. So I think, that gawk, as far as it can do more than nawk is useless. But it's not useless below, because then one can programm nawk on linux as a preparation to use it on some UNIX server. This is important for the book to choose. Because a gawk book contains many nice things which are not available to the nawk programmer.

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Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

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Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

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The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

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Last modified: October 20, 2014