Installing AWK locally

What awk do I have?

The Exercism AWK track uses gawk, GNU's AWK. You may already have it; to check, execute this command

awk --version

If that returns:

• something like GNU Awk 5.1.0 ...

  • You already have GNU awk and can carry on with the exercises.

• something like awk version 20200816

  • This is nawk, also known as BWK awk (after Brian Kernighan) or "one true awk".
  • This is what ships with MacOS and BSD systems.
  • Read below for installation instructions.

• the error awk: not an option: --version

  • You probably have mawk.
  • Confirm with: awk -W version which may return mawk 1.3.4 20200120.
  • mawk is a very good and fast awk implementation, but it doesn't have some of the gawk-specific features we'll use in the track.
  • Read below for installation instructions.

• the error awk: unrecognized option: version followed by BusyBox v1.35.0 ...

  • You might be using Alpine Linux.
  • Read below for installation instructions.

• a "command not found" error

  • Then either your PATH is messed up or you just don't have awk installed.
  • Read below for installation instructions.

Linux

Varies with your distro's package manager. Typically:

apt install gawk
yum install gawk
apk add gawk
# and so on

You may need to use sudo to execute the appropriate command.

MacOS

Homebrew is your friend. Follow the link to install it and then run:

brew install gawk

Windows

For WSL, see instructions for Linux above. For cygwin, install the gawk package.

Compile from source

For the brave, instructions available in the gawk manual.

Need more help?

Places to look for help for AWK questions:

• Stack Overflow awk tag.
• check the Resources section of the Stack Overflow awk tag into page.
• raise an issue at the exercism/awk Github repository.
• IRC: irc://irc.liberachat.net/#awk, irc://irc.liberachat.net/#exercism
  • see Libera.chat if you're unfamiliar with IRC.