Gawk/History-summary
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A.10 Summary
- The
awk
language has evolved over time. The first release was with V7 Unix, circa 1978. In 1987, for System V Release 3.1, major additions, including user-defined functions, were made to the language. Additional changes were made for System V Release 4, in 1989. Since then, further minor changes have happened under the auspices of the POSIX standard. - Brian Kernighan’s
awk
provides a small number of extensions that are implemented in common with other versions ofawk
. gawk
provides a large number of extensions over POSIXawk
. They can be disabled with either the--traditional
or--posix
options.- The interaction of POSIX locales and regexp matching in
gawk
has been confusing over the years. Today,gawk
implements Rational Range Interpretation, where ranges of the form ‘[a-z]
’ match only the characters numerically between ‘a
’ through ‘z
’ in the machine’s native character set. Usually this is ASCII, but it can be EBCDIC on IBM S/390 systems. - Many people have contributed to
gawk
development over the years. We hope that the list provided in this chapter is complete and gives the appropriate credit where credit is due.