1. n. [Unix techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name derives 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).