Volodymyr Gubarkov
How I program in AWK
January 2026
What is AWK?
AWK is a CLI utility (and a programming language), targeted at text processing, present in every Unix-like OS.
What do you program in AWK?
Makesure – a task runner that is somewhat similar to make, but
without most of its idiosyncrasies (and with a couple of unique features!).
Wait, but AWK is intended only for one-liners… How come you program a whole project in it?
Indeed, the language is really minimalistic, but it has just enough to fulfill certain kinds of projects.
Are you mad?
Who knows…
But what are the motivators?
Tremendous portability and fun
But AWK doesn’t have good IDE support for big-ish projects…
This was indeed the case. And this motivated me to create an AWK language support plugin for IntelliJ IDEA.
Now if you consider that using AWK for developing Makesure makes little sense, you still must admit that a byproduct result of the AWK IDEA plugin is already a good justification 😊.
Btw, you can read about one of my adventures in creating this plugin.
Did you create any other tools to make your AWK programming easier?
Sure:
- fhtagn – a tiny CLI tool for literate testing for command-line programs. I test Makesure with it.
- AWK code coverage support in GoAWK – I calculate test coverage for Makesure with it.
- mdBooker – it helps me to generate a Makesure documentation site makesure.dev from the project’s README.
Do you eat your own dog food?
Absolutely, see the tools above.
In addition, I use Makesure to develop Makesure.
Clearly, I develop Makesure in intellij-awk. I also use Makesure to develop intellij-awk itself.
I use Makesure to develop fhtagn.
And so on.
Any other practice you use?
I use awk_lab repo as a playground for my AWK experiments. A byproduct of such experiments was my re-implementation of gron in AWK.
It looks like you are having lots of fun with AWK…
Indeed! Find my Bytebeating story. Also check my cellular automata experiment.
Can you tell me more interesting facts about AWK?
You might find entertaining my AWK technical notes.
If you noticed a typo or have other feedback, please email me at xonixx@gmail.com