What is the difference between awk and gawk

Improve this question. What do you mean when you say awk? The default awk command can be any of several different implementations, depending on the system and how it's configured. You'll need to be more specific. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Gawk provides the additional features found in the current version of Brian Kernighan's awk and a number of GNU-specific extensions. Improve this answer. To quote the output of apt-cache show mawk Mawk is smaller and much faster than gawk.

Ed Morton Ed Morton k 17 17 gold badges 65 65 silver badges bronze badges. Shouldn't you use mawk if you need faster execution? Once upon a time when mawk was a minimally featured awk streamlined for performance that was the case, but now mawk supports more gawk extensions than any other awk except the defunct tawk so it's gone in a new direction.

In any case, usually awk performance issues are related to the design of the script being executed, not the awk implementation executing it, and all awk scripts typically run about as fast as equivalent compiled C programs so IMHO its best to just stick with gawk.

Apparently processing perl style regexps is quite processor intensive and unfortunately for performance, perl doesn't check the RE first to see if it uses any PCRE extensions and so every regexp is processed by the same regexp engine and so every regexp operation incurs a significant performance hit. Tell you what, I'll post the question and gawk stats and ask for input. Show 2 more comments. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. The features, such as, associative arrays, pattern-matching, and automatic handling of command-line argument files help in a better way for writing a programme in an easy way.

AWK helps in managing small and personal databases, generate reports, produce indexes, validate data, and perform other document preparation tasks. It also helps in experimenting with algorithms that can be adapted to other languages. GAWK also comes with all of these features. Apart from these features, GAWK has some additional features that make it easy for sorting data, extracting bits and pieces of data for processing, and also helps in performing simple network communications. AWK is the name that has been derived from the initials of the designers of this programme; Alfred V.

Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, and Brian W. Writing a programme becomes so easy with AWK which is a special-purpose programming language. GAWK is the 2. GWAK also comes with all these features. Trying to understand the differences between the two functions gawk vs. When would one use gawk vs awk? Or are they the same in terms of usage? AWK is a programming language. There are several implementations of AWK mostly in the form of interpreters.

The main implementations in use today are:. If you only care about standard features, call awk , which may be Gawk or nawk or mawk or some other implementation. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.

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