A peculiar goodie, token, saying or remembrance produced by or presented to a program. (With thanks to Professor Doug McIlroy.)

A series of awk statements attached to a rule. If the rule’s pattern matches an input record, awk executes the rule’s action. Actions are always enclosed in braces. (See Action Overview.)

A programming language originally defined by the U.S. Department of Defense for embedded programming. It was designed to enforce good Software Engineering practices.

Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto wrote a retargetable assembler completely as sed and awk scripts. It is thousands of lines long, including machine descriptions for several eight-bit microco [..]

Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto wrote a formatter that accepts a large subset of the ‘nroff -ms’ and ‘nroff -man’ formatting commands, using awk and sh. It is available from http://awk.info [..]

The regexp metacharacters ‘^’ and ‘$’, which force the match to the beginning or end of the string, respectively.

The American National Standards Institute. This organization produces many standards, among them the standards for the C and C++ programming languages. These standards often become international stand [..]

An argument can be two different things. It can be an option or a file name passed to a command while invoking it from the command line, or it can be something passed to a function inside a program, e [..]

A grouping of multiple values under the same name. Most languages just provide sequential arrays. awk provides associative arrays.

A statement in a program that a condition is true at this point in the program. Useful for reasoning about how a program is supposed to behave.