A Princeton professor, finding a little time for himself in the summer academic lull, emailed an old friend a couple months ago. Brian Kernighan said hello, asked how their friend’s US visit was going ...

I use awk all the time, but generally only to conveniently pull a particular field out of data that I’m workin with. Regardless of the separator used, awk makes it easy to extract just what you need.

The awk programming language often gets overlooked for Perl, which is a more capable language. Out in the real world, however awk is found even more ubiquitously than Perl. It also has a smaller ...

awk is a programming language optimized for text processing. It takes less code than sed or perl, where the input is field-based. bash and other interactive shells don't have the same capabilities ...

As a relatively isolated junior sysadmin, I remember seeing answers on Experts Exchange and later Stack Exchange that baffled me. Authors and commenters might chain 10 commands together with pipes and ...

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into interesting programming languages. In the past we have spoken to Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language, Don Syme, senior ...