This 45 year-old Unix tool is finally getting an upgrade
AWK, a software platform first introduced in 1977, has finally received a long-awaited update almost half a century after its inception.
What makes the launch more impressive is that it is the work of 80-year-old Canadian computer scientist Brian Kernighan, part of the team behind the software’s acronym itself (AWK – Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan).
POSIX compliance in operating system terms requires that it includes AWK, a programming language that’s destined to analyze text files. It first appeared in Version 7 UNIX in 1979, which is credited with being the last version of UNIX created by Bell Labs before it was commercialized by AT&T. Other POSIX-certified OSs include macOS, VxWorks, and z/OS.
AWK update
In a GitHub entry (opens in new tab), Kernighan writes about the update entitles “Add BWK’s email”. He says:
“Finally, with a bit of spare time after the academic treadmill slows, I have gotten back to futzing around with Unicode in awk.”
He writes that he now has it “mostly” working, “through a combination of using utf-8 internally for functions like length(), and conversion to utf-32 in regular expressions.”
Found in the update is one realloc bug, which leads Kernighan to suspect that they may be more. A “fair amount” of testing has already been undertaken, but he writes that “clearly more tests are needed.”
Comments in the thread highlight the significance of the update, and include one-liners like “wow” and “respect”.
The Register (opens in new tab) reports that the code was actually changed earlier in 2022, but was only picked up by wider audiences thanks to a recently released interview with Kernighan.
Audio player loading… AWK, a software platform first introduced in 1977, has finally received a long-awaited update almost half a century after its inception. What makes the launch more impressive is that it is the work of 80-year-old Canadian computer scientist Brian Kernighan, part of the team behind the software’s…
