What is "awk"

The AWK programming language was created in 1977 by scientists Alfred Aho, Peter J. Weinberger and Brian Kernighan at Bell Labs. The word AWK is an abbreviation of the initials of the surnames of the language creators (Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan).

The language is interpreted line by line and has as its main objective to make Shell scripts in Unix/Linux more powerful and with much more features without using many command lines (can solve infinities of everyday problems of the developer in these operating systems). It is widely used to process data with text and file manipulations.

Often used by developers to process text and manipulate files and outside it is based on C/C++ commands. It has as paradigms Scripting, procedural and event-oriented language.

This language is considered by many to be an important milestone in the history of programming, having had much influence on the creation of other programming languages, such as Perl and Lua.

source: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWK