AWK is a programming language tool for manipulating text and one of the core components of the UNIX operating system, and any POSIX-compliant operating system is considered to include AWK.Its name comes from the three original authors Alfred Aho,Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan initials for the surname.

AWK provides extremely powerful features: regular expression matching, pattern loading, flow control, mathematical operators, process control statements, and even built-in variables and functions. It has almost all the fancy features of a complete language. AWK does in fact have its own language: the AWK programming language, which the three creators have formally defined as a “style scanning and processing language”. It allows the creation of short programs that read input files, sort data, process data, perform calculations on input, and generate reports, among countless other functions. gawk is the GNU version of AWK.

Brian Kernighan revealed in a recent interview that he added Unicode support to AWK a few months ago. However, since he is not familiar with Git, he has not yet submitted a commit to the AWK code repository. Brian Kernighan said in the email that he was learning to use Git a few months ago, trying to better understand Git by submitting PRs. After figuring this out, he officially submitted a PR to add Unicode support to AWK.

In addition to AWK, I believe Professor Kernighan named “Unix” and invented the “Hello, world” language demonstration is more widely known.