GoAWK is a POSIX-compatible version of AWK, and additionally has a CSV mode for reading and writing CSV and TSV files.
The project has a good suite of tests, which include the developer’s own interpreter tests, the original AWK test suite, and the relevant tests from the Gawk test suite.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Proper support for CSV and TSV files (read the documentation).
- Code coverage feature.
- Supports negative field indexes to access fields from the right, for example, $-1 refers to the last field.
- Embeddable in your Go programs! You can even call custom Go functions from your AWK scripts.
- Most AWK scripts are faster than awk and on a par with gawk.
- The parser supports ‘single-quoted strings’ in addition to “double-quoted strings”, primarily to make Windows one-liners easier when using the cmd.exe shell (which uses ” as the quote character).
Website: benhoyt.com/writings/goawk
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Ben Hoyt
License: MIT License

GoAWK is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Alternatives to awk | |
|---|---|
| gawk | Implementation of the awk programming language |
| GoAWK | POSIX-compliant awk interpreter written in Go |
| Miller | Small and powerful CLI tool to do all your data processing |
| frawk | Small programming language for writing short programs processing textual data |
| choose | Human-friendly and fast alternative to cut and (sometimes) awk |
| gema | General purpose text processing utility based on the concept of pattern matching |
| mawk | Interpreter for the awk programming language |
| ruplacer | Find and replace text in source files |
| rawk | POSIX compatible AWK written in Rust |
| wak | awk implementation for toybox and standalone |
| PAWK | Python line processor |
| Hawk | Haskell text processor for the command-line |
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