The AWK Programming Language, Second Edition

Updated Wed Jun 28 06:46:29 EDT 2023

Introduction

This page is a placeholder for material related to the second edition of The AWK Programming Language. The first edition was written by Al Aho, Brian Kernighan and Peter Weinberger in 1988. Awk has evolved since then, there are multiple implementations, and of course the computing world has changed enormously. The new edition of the Awk book reflects some of those changes.

The book will be available by the end of September. In the meantime, we will add material that we hope will be of interest -- historical documents, bits of code, and occasional essays on Awk and related topics.

Awk Source and Documentation

Awk source is maintained at https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk.

Gawk releases are at https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gawk;

the Gawk manual is here.

Arnold Robbins has compiled a list of

other implementations of Awk.

Historical Documents

The citations in the original Awk book have by now become quite dusty, but some of the material is still interesting and potentially useful. Here are references to some of the documents, perhaps updated.

AWK - A Pattern Scanning and Processing Language, the original Awk paper from Software Practice and Experience, 1979.

CSTR 118:

An internal technical report on Awk, dated June 1985, so it's not the original language but more or less the one described in the Awk book in 1988.

dformat: Dformat is an Awk program, originally written by Jon Bentley, for drawing data-format diagrams. The version here comes from Arnold Robbins (to whom thanks), who has fixed it up and made it work properly in today's environments.

chem:

Chem was an experiment in little languages, a language for describing chemical structure diagrams. (Think benzene rings on steroids.) It wasn't much used but it was a good exercise.

The link above is to a somewhat blurry but complete PDF of the original chem paper by Bentley, Lynn Jelinski and bwk, published in Computational Chemistry in 1987.

indexing programs:

One of the examples in the original Awk book was a simplified version of indexing tools first created by Jon Bentley, and used both for both editions of the book. The link above provides the code; the paper published in Electronic Publishing -- Origination Dissemination and Design in 1988 is temporarily unavailable.

Algorithm animation: by Jon Bentley and bwk. The paper A System for Algorithm Animation (1991) describes a system for embedding simple graphics commands in program output that could be used to display an "animated" version of the output. It all worked on monochrome displays, so it's totally dated now, but it was neat at the time. The original Computing Science Technical Report (CSTR) 132 is here.

Netlib's typesetting collection Includes some links to chem and indexing programs

Interview with Al Aho about Awk in Computerworld, May 2008

Interview with Brian Kernighan about Awk and AMPL, Computerworld, October 2009

The AWK Programming Language, Second Edition