awk

there are many versions of awk

ubuntu comes with mawk installed by default, though we could switch it out for other variants (like gawk) should we decide to.

about mawk:

[dkg@metis ~]$ apt-cache show mawk
Package: mawk
Priority: required
Section: base
Installed-Size: 220
Maintainer: James Troup <james@nocrew.org>
Architecture: i386
Version: 1.3.3-11
Provides: awk
Pre-Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.2.ds1-4)
Filename: pool/main/m/mawk/mawk_1.3.3-11_i386.deb
Size: 78860
MD5sum: 53c1c771395c94346c1c74119d7ce940
Description: a pattern scanning and text processing language
 Mawk is an interpreter for the AWK Programming Language. The AWK
 language is useful for manipulation of data files, text retrieval and
 processing, and for prototyping and experimenting with algorithms. Mawk
 is a new awk meaning it implements the AWK language as defined in Aho,
 Kernighan and Weinberger, The AWK Programming Language, Addison-Wesley
 Publishing, 1988. (Hereafter referred to as the AWK book.) Mawk conforms
 to the POSIX 1003.2 (draft 11.3) definition of the AWK language
 which contains a few features not described in the AWK book, and mawk
 provides a small number of extensions.
 .
 Mawk is smaller and much faster than gawk. It has some compile-time
 limits such as NF = 32767 and sprintf buffer = 1020.
Bugs: mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com
Origin: Ubuntu

[dkg@metis ~]$