awk

[OE. auk, awk (properly) turned away; (hence) contrary, wrong, from Icel. öfigr, öfugr, afigr, turning the wrong way, fr. af off, away; cf. OHG. abuh, Skr. apāc turned away, fr. apa off, away + a root ak, aŬk, to bend, from which come also E. angle, anchor.]

1. Odd; out of order; perverse. [Obs.]

2. Wrong, or not commonly used; clumsy; sinister; as, the awk end of a rod (the but end). [Obs.] Golding.

3. Clumsy in performance or manners; unhandy; not dexterous; awkward. [Obs. or Prov. Eng.]

Awk
adv.

Perversely; in the wrong way. L'Estrange.

(Aho Weinberger Kernighan) A Unix programming utility developed in 1977 by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan. Due to its unique pattern-matching syntax, awk is often used in data retrieval and data transformation. Awk is widely used to search for a particular occurrence of text and perform some operation on it. Awk is an interpreted language, which has been ported to other computing environments, including DOS. See Gawk.

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1. n. [Unix techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name derives from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing. See also Perl.

2. n. Editing term for an expression awkward to manipulate through normal regexp facilities (for example, one containing a newline).

3. vt. To process data using awk(1).