Talk by Cody Mello.

The AWK utility is one of the most useful tools in the Unix toolbox, serving system administrators, programmers, and data scientists alike. Like many others, I started out using AWK as an improved replacement for cut, but it quickly became my Swiss Army knife of text manipulation in the shell. AWKs elegance lies in its ability to grow with the users needs and experience: as I learned more of the AWK programming language, I found myself abandoning my complicated grep, cut and sed pipelines, and reaching for AWK for tasks I would have done by hand in VIM, or solved with a general-purpose scripting language.

In this talk, I will give a quick introduction to AWK for the uninitiated, take a look back at how AWK has evolved 1977, and explore what AWK teaches us about designing new tools and purpose-built languages.