wk is a programming language that gets its name from the 3 people who invented it (Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan). Because it was developed on a Unix operating system, its name is usually printed in lower-case ("awk") instead of capitalized ("Awk"). awk is distributed as free software, meaning that you don't have to pay anything for it and you can get the source code to build awk yourself  .

It's not an "I can do anything" programming language like C++ or VisualBasic, although it can do a lot. awk excels at handling text and data files, the kind that are created in Notepad or (for example) HTML files. You wouldn't use awk to modify a Microsoft Word document or an Excel spreadsheet. However, if you take the Word document and Save As "Text Only" or if you take the Excel spreadsheet and Save As tab-delimited (*.txt) or comma-delimited (*.csv) output files, then awk could do a good job at handling them.

To Download this E-Book Click Here.