---
title: "GNU Gawk 5.4 Released With New MinRX Regex Matcher, Faster Reading Of Files"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/gnu-gawk-5-4-released-with-new-minrx-regex-matcher-faster-reading-of-files-jrqtuntkb
source_url: https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Gawk-5.4-Released
type: article
source: "Phoronix"
published: 2026-02-22T17:21:22.427Z
updated: 2026-02-22T17:21:41.406Z
tags: ["linux", "nlp"]
reading_time: 2
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# GNU Gawk 5.4 Released With New MinRX Regex Matcher, Faster Reading Of Files

**[Phoronix](https://daily.dev/sources/phoronix)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

GNU Gawk 5.4 has been released with several notable changes. The most significant is the adoption of the new MinRX regular expression engine as the default matcher, written by the original GNU grep developer Mike Haertel. MinRX is fully POSIX compliant, unlike the existing GNU matchers. The release also brings roughly 9% faster reading of large regular disk files by eliminating unnecessary timeout checks. Additional improvements include UTF-8 support for MinGW Windows and Cygwin ports, POSIX 2024 spec handling, multi-byte character support in the ordchr extension, a new --enable-o3 build flag for -O3 compiler optimizations, improved BSD and OpenVMS support, and the first Arabic translation of Gawk.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Gawk-5.4-Released>

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---

Tags: [#linux](https://daily.dev/tags/linux), [#nlp](https://daily.dev/tags/nlp)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/gnu-gawk-5-4-released-with-new-minrx-regex-matcher-faster-reading-of-files-jrqtuntkb)