Trying to understand the differences between the two functions gawk vs. awk? When would one use gawk vs awk? Or are they the same in terms of usage?
Also, could one provide an example?
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Sign up to join this communityTrying to understand the differences between the two functions gawk vs. awk? When would one use gawk vs awk? Or are they the same in terms of usage?
Also, could one provide an example?
AWK is a programming language. There are several implementations of AWK (mostly in the form of interpreters). AWK has been codified in POSIX. The main implementations in use today are:
nawk
(“new awk”, an evolution of oawk
, the original UNIX implementation), used on *BSD and widely available on Linux;mawk
, a fast implementation that mostly sticks to standard features;gawk
, the GNU implementation, with many extensions;If you only care about standard features, call awk
, which may be Gawk or nawk or mawk or some other implementation. If you want the features in GNU awk, use gawk
or Perl or Python.
awk
is pretty close in behavior to gawk
v3; I think it's more full-featured than nawk
.
Apr 19, 2012 at 19:37
buster
release included a 1996 release of mawk
. The recent bullseye
release brought us up to a 2020 version - 1.3.4. Oddly perhaps - at least on my RPi OS buster
system - the 1996 mawk
was never updated/upgraded during 3 years of use.