Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
💻 A programming language ✈️ Wake Island code
AWK

AWK

1 9.6
A computer language used to find and change text in files or a program written in it
  • noun
  • /ɔːk/
  • Specialized
: AWK
  • That's just awk-- awkward.

But the one I, I guess favourite would be AWK.

Examples

  • It was a very awk... awkward moment.

    The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

  • 3. awk solution for a lot of numbers in a line:

    Blog text (20)

  • More awk-waaard.

    Thin Lizzy: Outlawed - The Real Phil Lynott (2006)

  • Parrot: Braaa-awk!

    Fiction book (2000)

  • The earlier awk solution won't be feasible if there are lots of numbers in a line, and hence this way. A loop is run on the entire list of columns. Each value present in the column is added to the variable x, which at the end of the loop contains the sum of all the numbers in the line.

    Blog text (20)

  • This trick is very useful if you want to pipe the results to another BEDOPS command or another utility that consumes BED-formatted data, like awk, Perl, or Python scripts, etc.

    Blog text (13)

  • The awk programming language is often used for transforming and extracting information from text files.

  • Many developers find awk to be an efficient tool for text manipulation in their programming tasks.

  • With awk, users can write scripts that automate complex data analysis processes in text files.

Synonyms

scripting language
vsAWK
  • Specialized
3 4.9

A way to write small computer programs that run by themselves to do tasks

is a specific tool focused on processing and analyzing text files

Surface Forms

AWK singular
AWKs plural

Etymology

AWK for the programming language comes from the last names of its three creators: Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan. So AWK is simply their initials 'A', 'W', 'K', which is why the language has that short name.