B.6 Other Freely Available awk Implementations

It's kind of fun to put comments like this in your awk code.
// Do C++ comments work? answer: yes! of course
Michael Brennan

There are a number of other freely available awk implementations. This section briefly describes where to get them:

Unix awk

Brian Kernighan has made his implementation of awk freely available. You can retrieve this version via the World Wide Web from his home page.¹ It is available in several archive formats:

Shell archive

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/btl.mirror/awk.shar

Compressed tar file

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/btl.mirror/awk.tar.gz

Zip file

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/btl.mirror/awk.zip

This version requires an ISO C (1990 standard) compiler; the C compiler from GCC (the GNU Compiler Collection) works quite nicely.

See BTL, for a list of extensions in this awk that are not in POSIX awk.

mawk

Michael Brennan has written an independent implementation of awk, called mawk. It is available under the GPL (see Copying), just as gawk is.

The original distribution site for the mawk source code no longer has it. A copy has been made available at http://www.skeeve.com/gawk/mawk1.3.3.tar.gz.

In 2009, Thomas Dickey took on mawk maintenance. Basic information is availabe on the project's web page. The download URL is ftp://invisible-island.net/mawk/mawk.tar.gz.

Once you have it, gunzip may be used to decompress this file. Installation is similar to gawk's (see Unix Installation).

mawk has the following extensions that are not in POSIX awk:

• The fflush built-in function for flushing buffered output (see I/O Functions).
• The ‘**’ and ‘**=’ operators (see Arithmetic Ops and also see Assignment Ops).
• The use of func as an abbreviation for function (see Definition Syntax).
• The ‘\x’ escape sequence (see Escape Sequences).
• The /dev/stdout, and /dev/stderr special files (see Special Files). Use "-" instead of "/dev/stdin" with mawk.
• The ability for FS and for the third argument to split to be null strings (see Single Character Fields).
• The ability to delete all of an array at once with ‘delete array’ (see Delete).
• The ability for RS to be a regexp (see Records).
• The BINMODE special variable for non-Unix operating systems (see PC Using).

It is to be hoped that a future version of mawk will support nextfile (see Nextfile Statement).

awka

Written by Andrew Sumner, awka translates awk programs into C, compiles them, and links them with a library of functions that provides the core awk functionality. It also has a number of extensions.

The awk translator is released under the GPL, and the library is under the LGPL.

To get awka, go to http://awka.sourceforge.net. You can reach Andrew Sumner at andrew@zbcom.net.

pawk

Nelson H.F. Beebe at the University of Utah has modified the Bell Labs awk to provide timing and profiling information. It is different from pgawk (see Profiling), in that it uses CPU-based profiling, not line-count profiling. You may find it at either ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/pawk/pawk-20030606.tar.gz or http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/pawk/pawk-20030606.tar.gz.

The OpenSolaris POSIX awk

The version of awk in /usr/xpg4/bin on Solaris is POSIX compliant. It is based on the awk from Mortice Kern Systems for PCs. The source code can be downloaded from the OpenSolaris web site.² This author was able to make it compile and work under GNU/Linux with 1–2 hours of work. Making it more generally portable (using GNU Autoconf and/or Automake) would take more work, and this has not been done, at least to our knowledge.

jawk

This is an interpreter for awk written in Java. It claims to be a full interpreter, although because it uses Java facilities for I/O and for regexp matching, the language it supports is different from POSIX awk. More information is available on the project's home page.³.

This is an independent implementation of awk distributed under the GPL. It has a large number of extensions over standard awk and may not be 100% syntactically compatible with it. See http://www.quiktrim.org/QTawk.html for more information, including the manual and a download link.