awklab.comThe BEHILOS BenchmarkIn his book Unix: A History and a Memoir, Brian Kernighan recounts his favorite grep story from the early days of Unix. Someone at Bell Labs asked whether it was possible to find English words composed only of the letters formed by an upside-down cal...Feb 10·7 min read
awklab.comAWK: the Zero-Setup Pre-ProcessorModern data pipelines most often fail at their beginning, not their end. A malformed record, an unexpected delimiter, or an encoding anomaly can cause otherwise robust processing engines to abort after consuming significant computational resources. T...Feb 1·7 min read
awklab.comAWK Syntax EssentialsSyntax is based on The AWK Programming Language, 2nd Edition by Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, and Peter J. Weinberger. Pattern A pattern determines when an action is executed. When a pattern matches an input line, its associated action is execut...Jan 31·8 min read
awklab.comWhy AWK in 2026?Because small is beautiful. Because AWK gives unmatched bang for the buck. Because AWK is the antidote to AI slop. Because AWK is always there when you need it. Because AWK assumes your data fits in a pipe, not a cluster. Because AWK makes you t...Jan 29·1 min read
awklab.comPractical AWK Benchmarking"I think in terms of programming languages you get the most bang for your buck by learning AWK", said Brian Kernighan, the K in AWK (Lex Fridman podcast #109). AWK was created in Bell Labs in 1977, and its name is derived from the surnames of its au...Jan 26·11 min read
