Awk

Abstract

Awkay, are you ready to learn a real programming language? awk is a text-editing tool that was developed by Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan in the late 1970s. Since then, awk has been largely improved and is now a complete and powerful programming language. The appealing thing for scientists is that awk is easy enough to be learned quickly and powerful enough to execute most relevant data analysis and transformation tasks. Thus, awk must not be awkward. awk can be used to do calculations as well as to edit text. Things that cannot be done with sed can be done with awk. Things you cannot do with awk you can do with perl. Things you cannot do with perl you should ask a computer scientist to do for you.