AWK (gawk)

Website: http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/

AWK is a powerful text-processing language and tool designed for pattern scanning and data extraction. Named after its creators (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan), it excels at processing structured text data like CSV, log files, and output from other commands. GNU Awk (gawk) is the most common implementation.

Key Features

• Field-Based Processing — Automatically split input into fields by delimiter
• Pattern-Action Pairs — Execute actions only when patterns match
• Built-in Variables — NR, NF, FS, OFS, and many more for flexible processing
• Associative Arrays — Powerful in-memory data structures for aggregation
• File-Level Control — Process multiple files, track filenames and records

Platform

Linux, macOS, BSD, Windows (via WSL/Cygwin)

Licence

GNU General Public License v3

Website

http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/