(gawk) History

 
 History of `awk' and `gawk'
 ===========================
 
    The name `awk' comes from the initials of its designers: Alfred V.
 Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, and Brian W. Kernighan.  The original version
 of `awk' was written in 1977 at AT&T Bell Laboratories.  In 1985 a new
 version made the programming language more powerful, introducing
 user-defined functions, multiple input streams, and computed regular
 expressions.  This new version became generally available with Unix
 System V Release 3.1.  The version in System V Release 4 added some new
 features and also cleaned up the behavior in some of the "dark corners"
 of the language.  The specification for `awk' in the POSIX Command
 Language and Utilities standard further clarified the language based on
 feedback from both the `gawk' designers, and the original Bell Labs
 `awk' designers.
 
    The GNU implementation, `gawk', was written in 1986 by Paul Rubin
 and Jay Fenlason, with advice from Richard Stallman.  John Woods
 contributed parts of the code as well.  In 1988 and 1989, David
 Trueman, with help from Arnold Robbins, thoroughly reworked `gawk' for
 compatibility with the newer `awk'.  Current development focuses on bug
 fixes, performance improvements, standards compliance, and
 occasionally, new features.
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(gawk) Preface
(gawk) Manual History
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