Names (The GNU Awk User’s Guide)
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A Rose by Any Other Name
The awk
language has evolved over the years. Full details are provided in The Evolution of the awk Language. The language described in this Web page is often referred to as “new awk
.” By analogy, the original version of awk
is referred to as “old awk
.”
On most current systems, when you run the awk
utility you get some version of new awk
.4 If your system’s standard awk
is the old one, you will see something like this if you try the following test program:
$ awk 1 /dev/null error→ awk: syntax error near line 1 error→ awk: bailing out near line 1
In this case, you should find a version of new awk
, or just install gawk
!
Throughout this Web page, whenever we refer to a language feature that should be available in any complete implementation of POSIX awk
, we simply use the term awk
. When referring to a feature that is specific to the GNU implementation, we use the term gawk
.
Footnotes
(4)
Only Solaris systems still use an old awk
for the default awk
utility. A more modern awk
lives in /usr/xpg6/bin
on these systems.