2025-09-26 –, A202
The awk processing language has been around for almost 50 years in the Unix space. All major BSDs include awk in the base system. It allows powerful and flexible processing of text inputs. However, users find it difficult to understand and awk-ward to use, even shying away from using it in the first place.
Benedict Reuschling is a documentation committer in the FreeBSD project. In the past, he served on the
FreeBSD core team for two terms. For more than 8 years, he administered a big data cluster at the University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany. He’s also teaching a course “Unix for Developers” for undergraduates. Benedict is one of the hosts of the weekly bsdnow.tv podcast.