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History of @command{awk} and @command{gawk}

Recipe For A Programming Language

1 part egrep 1 part snobol
2 parts ed 3 parts C

Blend all parts well using lex and yacc. Document minimally and release.

After eight years, add another part egrep and two more parts C. Document very well and release.

The name @command{awk} comes from the initials of its designers: Alfred V. Aho, Peter J. Weinberger and Brian W. Kernighan. The original version of @command{awk} was written in 1977 at AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 1985, a new version made the programming language more powerful, introducing user-defined functions, multiple input streams, and computed regular expressions. This new version became widely available with Unix System V Release 3.1 (SVR3.1). The version in SVR4 added some new features and cleaned up the behavior in some of the "dark corners" of the language. The specification for @command{awk} in the POSIX Command Language and Utilities standard further clarified the language. Both the @command{gawk} designers and the original Bell Laboratories @command{awk} designers provided feedback for the POSIX specification. Paul Rubin wrote the GNU implementation, @command{gawk}, in 1986. Jay Fenlason completed it, with advice from Richard Stallman. John Woods contributed parts of the code as well. In 1988 and 1989, David Trueman, with help from me, thoroughly reworked @command{gawk} for compatibility with the newer @command{awk}. Circa 1995, I became the primary maintainer. Current development focuses on bug fixes, performance improvements, standards compliance, and occasionally, new features. In May of 1997, J@"urgen Kahrs felt the need for network access from @command{awk}, and with a little help from me, set about adding features to do this for @command{gawk}. At that time, he also wrote the bulk of TCP/IP Internetworking with @command{gawk} (a separate document, available as part of the @command{gawk} distribution). His code finally became part of the main @command{gawk} distribution with @command{gawk} version 3.1. @xref{Contributors, ,Major Contributors to @command{gawk}}, for a complete list of those who made important contributions to @command{gawk}.

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