(Aho Weinberger Kernighan) A Unix programming utility developed in 1977 by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan. Due to its unique pattern-matching syntax, awk is often used in data retrieval and data transformation. Awk is widely used to search for a particular occurrence of text and perform some operation on it. Awk is an interpreted language, which has been ported to other computing environments, including DOS. See Gawk.