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AWK is a computer pattern/action language that can be used for data analysis, manipulation and simple reporting. It is one of the early tools to appear in Version 3 UNIX and gained popularity as a way to add computational features to a UNIX pipeline. The name AWK is derived from the surnames of its authors, Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, Peter J. Weinberger.
A version of AWK is a standard feature of nearly every modern unix-like operating system available today. The most common versions are listed at http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook/ .
Awk is an example of a programming language that uses the string datatype.
The power, terseness and limitations of AWK programs and sed scripts inspired Larry Wall to write Perl.