mawk (fast awk implementation) mawk (Mike's AWK) is an interpreter for the AWK Programming Language. It's a very fast AWK implementation based on a bytecode interpreter. Originally written by Mike Brennan, mawk is currently maintained by Thomas E. Dickey. The AWK language is useful for manipulation of data files, text retrieval and processing, and for prototyping and experimenting with algorithms. mawk is a new awk meaning it implements the AWK language as defined in Aho, Kernighan and Weinberger, The AWK Programming Language, Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1988. mawk conforms to the Posix 1003.2 (draft 11.3) definition of the AWK language which contains a few features not described in the AWK book, and mawk provides a small number of extensions. This build does not conflict with Slackware's own awk (from the gawk package). By default, mawk is built using its own built-in regular expression engine. In recent mawk versions, the only user-visible difference between the built-in and glibc regex engines is that the glibc engine doesn't support embedded NUL characters (can't use \x00 to match a NUL, for instance). If there are other difference in usage, they are undocumented. If you require the glibc engine, export BUILTIN_REGEX=no in the script's environment.