Gawk: Effective AWK Programming. AWK. AWK was created at Bell Labs in the 1970s,[3] and its name is derived from the family names of its authors – Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan.
The acronym is pronounced the same as the name of the bird, auk (which acts as an emblem of the language such as on The AWK Programming Language book cover - the book is often referred to by the abbreviation TAPL). When written in all lowercase letters, as awk, it refers to the Unix or Plan 9 program that runs scripts written in the AWK programming language. History[edit] AWK was preceded by sed (1974) – they are both designed for text processing, share the line-oriented, data-driven paradigm, and are particularly suited to writing one-liner programs, due to the implicit main loop and current line variables.
Sed is significantly simpler, while AWK can be seen as extending the same approach. The AWK Programming Language.