gawk ☆

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Description:
GNU awk utility

Type: Formula | Tracked Since: Dec 28, 2025

Links: Homepage | formulae.brew.sh

Category: Developer tools

Tags: text-processing cli awk gnu data-extraction reporting

Install: brew install gawk

About:
Gawk is the GNU implementation of the AWK programming language, designed for text processing and pattern scanning. It processes files line by line, splitting each line into fields and performing actions based on specified patterns. It is a powerful tool for data extraction, transformation, and reporting directly from the command line.

Key Features:

Full implementation of the AWK language
Rich set of built-in functions for string and numeric manipulation
Supports extended regular expressions
Can be used for complex data processing and report generation
Extensible with user-defined functions

Use Cases:

Parsing and transforming log files for analysis
Extracting specific columns of data from CSV or fixed-width files
Generating formatted reports from raw text input
Quick data summarization and calculations in shell scripts

Alternatives:

mawk – A faster, more lightweight AWK implementation, but with fewer features than Gawk.
sed – Better for simple line-based substitutions, but lacks the advanced programming constructs of Gawk.
perl – A much more powerful scripting language, but heavier and more complex for simple text-processing tasks.

Version History

Detected	Version	Rev	Change	Commit
Sep 18, 2024 2:53pm		0	VERSION_BUMP	83034b44