This book teaches you about the awk language and how you can use it effectively. You should already be familiar with basic system commands, such as cat and ls,(1) and basic shell facilities, such as Input/Output (I/O) redirection and pipes.

Implementations of the awk language are available for many different computing environments. This book, while describing the awk language in general, also describes a particular implementation of awk called gawk (which stands for "GNU Awk"). Gawk runs on a broad range of Unix systems, ranging from 80386 PC-based computers, up through large scale systems, such as Crays. Gawk has also been ported to MS-DOS and OS/2 PC's, Atari and Amiga micro-computers, and VMS.