1. <tool, language> (Named from the authors' initials) An
interpreted language included with many versions of Unix for
massaging text data, developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger,
and Brian Kernighan in 1978. It is characterised by C-like
syntax, declaration-free variables, associative arrays, and
field-oriented text processing.
There is a GNU version called gawk and other varients
including bawk, mawk, nawk, tawk. Perl was inspired
in part by awk but is much more powerful.
Unix manual page: awk(1).
netlib WWW. netlib
FTP.
["The AWK Programming Language" A. Aho, B. Kernighan,
P. Weinberger, A-W 1988].
2. <jargon> An expression which is awkward to manipulate
through normal regexp facilities, for example, one
containing a newline.
