General Introduction

This file documents awk, a program that you can use to select particular records in a file and perform operations upon them.

Copyright © 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1996–2005, 2007, 2009–2023
Free Software Foundation, Inc.



This is Edition 5.3 of GAWK: Effective AWK Programming: A User’s Guide for GNU Awk, for the 5.3.0 (or later) version of the GNU implementation of AWK.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant Sections being “GNU General Public License”, with the Front-Cover Texts being “A GNU Manual”, and with the Back-Cover Texts as in (a) below. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.

  1. The FSF’s Back-Cover Text is: “You have the freedom to copy and modify this GNU manual.”

Short Table of Contents

Table of Contents