Awk

1. n. [UNIX techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name is from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing.

See also Perl.

2. n. Editing term for an expression awkward to manipulate through normal regexp facilities (for example, one containing a newline).

3. vt. To process data using 'awk(1)'.