At the October UUASC OC meeting, Vincent Cordrey will present a talk on AWK, the language named for its originators: Aho, Kernighan, and Weinberger.

On UNIX systems, awk is a universally available general purpose programming and scripting language that picks up where the shells and sed leave off. It is well suited to processing lists, manipulating data files, and parsing the tabular output of other tools and programs. This talk is designed for those with at least a passing familiarity with shell programming, but does not assume any baseline knowledge of awk. The discussion centers around a feature not well documented in most popular literature. This and other features set awk apart from other scripting and programming languages making it a powerful tool for systems administration and daily command line use. While this is not an advanced topics class, most attendees should find some useful techniques in the examples.