History (The GNU Awk User’s Guide)
History of awk and gawk
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The name awk
comes from the initials of its designers: Alfred V. Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, and Brian W. Kernighan. The original version of 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 (1987). The version in System V Release 4 (1989) added some new features and cleaned up the behavior in some of the “dark corners” of the language. The specification for awk
in the POSIX Command Language and Utilities standard further clarified the language. Both the gawk
designers and the original awk
designers at Bell Laboratories provided feedback for the POSIX specification.
Paul Rubin wrote 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 gawk
for compatibility with the newer awk
. Circa 1994, I became the primary maintainer. Current development focuses on bug fixes, performance improvements, standards compliance, and, occasionally, new features.
In May 1997, Jürgen Kahrs felt the need for network access from awk
, and with a little help from me, set about adding features to do this for gawk
. At that time, he also wrote the bulk of TCP/IP Internetworking with gawk (a separate document, available as part of the gawk
distribution). His code finally became part of the main gawk
distribution with gawk
version 3.1.
John Haque rewrote the gawk
internals, in the process providing an awk
-level debugger. This version became available as gawk
version 4.0 in 2011.
See section Major Contributors to gawk for a full list of those who have made important contributions to gawk
.