The AWK Programming Language, 2nd Edition

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Epilogue

By now you should be a reasonably adept Awk user, or at least no longer an awkward beginner. As you have studied the examples and written some code of your own, you may have wondered why Awk programs are the way they are, and perhaps wanted to make them better.

The first part of this chapter provides a little history, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Awk as a programming language. The second part explores the performance of Awk programs, and suggests some ways of reformulating problems that have become too large for a single program.

9.1 Awk as a Language

We began working on Awk in 1977. At that time the Unix programs that searched text files (grep and sed) only had regular expression patterns, and the only actions were ...