wak is a compact implementation of the awk programming language designed for both standalone use and integration with Toybox.
Written in C, it aims to follow traditional awk behaviour closely and focuses on practical compatibility with established awk implementations rather than a large set of non-standard language extensions.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Mostly compatible with POSIX awk, BusyBox awk, mawk, and Brian Kernighan’s One True Awk, while excluding most gawk-specific extensions.
- Provides modular source, a one-file monolithic source version, and a Toybox-oriented source tree.
- Includes make targets for building, testing, and installing, along with a minimal configure script.
- Ships with more than 200 validation tests.
- Supports static Linux builds, including smaller binaries when built with musl.
Website: github.com/raygard/wak
Support:
Developer: Ray Gardner
License: BSD Zero Clause License

wak is written in C. Learn C 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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