How was awk created, according to Brian Kernighan?

Brian Kernighan said awk came out of conversations around 1976 or 1977 between three Bell Labs colleagues: Al Aho, who was interested in regular expressions, Peter Weinberger, who was interested in databases and report generation, and Kernighan, who wanted a tool that treated strings and numbers as equals. After they settled a design, Weinberger built the first version over a weekend using Steve Johnson's yacc and Mike Lesk's lex, with Aho's existing regular expression code. Kernighan later inherited maintenance and recently added UTF-8 and CSV support for the book's second edition.

• The name awk comes from the authors' initials: Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan.
• Kernighan said most Unix tools, such as Stu Feldman's make, began as fixes for their authors' own problems.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Ryan Peterman (2026-10-26). Read the whole episode summary →

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