awk and gawk ¶| Recipe for a Programming Language | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Blend all parts well using After eight years, add another part After 35 more years, add Unicode and CSV support, sprinkle lightly with
a few choice features from |
The name awk comes from the initials of its designers: Alfred V.
Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, and Brian W. Kernighan. The original version of
awk was written in 1977 at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
In 1985, a new version made the programming
language more powerful, introducing user-defined functions, multiple input
streams, and computed regular expressions.
This new version became widely available with Unix System V
Release 3.1 (1987).
The version in System V Release 4 (1989) added some new features and cleaned
up the behavior in some of the “dark corners” of the language.
The specification for awk in the POSIX Command Language
and Utilities standard further clarified the language.
Both the gawk designers and the original awk designers at Bell Laboratories
provided feedback for the POSIX specification.
Paul Rubin wrote gawk in 1986.
Jay Fenlason completed it, with advice from Richard Stallman. John Woods
contributed parts of the code as well. In 1988 and 1989, David Trueman, with
help from me, thoroughly reworked gawk for compatibility
with the newer awk.
Circa 1994, I became the primary maintainer.
Current development focuses on bug fixes,
performance improvements, standards compliance, and, occasionally, new features.
In May 1997, Jürgen Kahrs felt the need for network access
from awk, and with a little help from me, set about adding
features to do this for gawk. At that time, he also
wrote the bulk of
TCP/IP Internetworking with gawk
(a separate document, available as part of the gawk distribution).
His code finally became part of the main gawk distribution
with gawk version 3.1.
John Haque rewrote the gawk internals, in the process providing
an awk-level debugger. This version became available as
gawk version 4.0 in 2011.
See Major Contributors to gawk
for a full list of those who have made important contributions to gawk.