The state of the AWK

AWK, the Unix text-processing language created at Bell Labs in 1977, remains widely used in 2020 across Linux administration, build tooling, and even big data processing. The survey covers the three main AWK implementations — classic awk (nawk), GNU Awk (gawk), and mawk — and details notable gawk changes since version 4.0, including namespaces in gawk 5.0, a revamped C extension API, a pretty-printer, the typeof() function, and regex constants as first-class types. Despite debate about its relevance, AWK continues to appear in major open-source projects like the Linux kernel, Neovim, and FFmpeg, and has been used to process tens of terabytes of data as a simpler alternative to Hadoop or Spark.