This 45 year-old Unix tool is finally getting an upgrade

Date:
Fri, 16 Dec 2022 18:53:17 +0000

Description:
New AWK update was almost half a century in the making.

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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 thats 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 , 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. Read more

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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 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. Check out the best laptops for programming or the best workstations



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/45-year-old-unix-tool-finally-gets-an-upgrade


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