Purpose: to describe awk, an early [Unix] [tiny language] .

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See http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/awkbook/index.html which is a page for an ''official'' book by the creators of the language.  See also news:comp.lang.awk .
Another good resource for awk documentation is http://www.gnu.org/manual/gawk-3.1.0/gawk.html .

Programmers often come to the Tcl newsgroups asking for help invoking awk or performing awk-like functions.  This is because Awk's ability to scan through a file and manipulate the contents pre-dates [Perl]'s functionality to do this, and frankly awk's abilities, while cruder in many ways, are also simpler (simpler even than Tcl's!).

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