AWK is a small programming language designed for processing text, created at Bell Labs and named after the initials of its authors, Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan. A program consists of patterns paired with actions, and the interpreter reads input line by line, splitting each into fields and running the actions on lines that match. This made it ideal for quick reports, data extraction and file transformations on Unix systems, and it is still used in shell scripts. An expanded version appeared in 1985, and implementations such as GNU awk followed. Its ideas influenced later scripting languages, notably Perl.
Before and after
- October 1976First edition of Toronto International Film Festival
- 1977Origins of Chicago Marathon
- 1977Free as a Bird
- 1977Voyager program
- 1977Invention of AWK
- 1977Establishment of Khangchendzonga National Park
- 1977Creation of Berkeley Software Distribution
- 1977Founding of International Fund for Agricultural Development
- 1977Rise of Charter 77
More in Science & technology
- 1945Invention of computer
- 29 October 1969Invention of Internet
- 1971Email
- July 2000Discovery of livermorium
- 15 January 2001Wikipedia
- 20 October 2004Creation of Ubuntu
The era
This moment belongs to the Contemporary world (1945 CE to today), the world since 1945. You can also browse everything in the 20th century.