AWK was created in the late 1970s by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan at Bell Labs, as a tool for processing text files. Prior to AWK, text processing was typically done using general-purpose programming languages like C or Fortran, which required a lot of boilerplate code to handle common tasks like parsing and manipulating text.
The name “AWK” is derived from the first letter of each of the authors’ last names. The initial version of AWK was implemented in the C programming language and was released as part of the Unix operating system in 1977.
Over the years, AWK has evolved and expanded with new features and capabilities. In 1985, a new version of AWK called “nawk” (for “new AWK”) was developed by Brian Kernighan and other contributors. Nawk added several new features, including regular expression matching and user-defined functions.
In the 1990s, a GNU implementation of AWK called “gawk” was developed by Free Software Foundation. Gawk added even more features, such as dynamic regular expressions, associative arrays, and advanced string manipulation functions.
Today, AWK remains a popular tool for processing and manipulating text files, especially in Unix-based systems. It is also widely used in data processing and analysis, and has influenced the design of many other programming languages and tools.