zawk: AWK for the Age of CSV, Parquet, Databases and AI
· 5 min read
AWK is almost fifty years old, and it is still one of the best tools ever made for "scan records, filter, transform, aggregate, print". But the data we scan has changed: CSV with quoted commas, JSON Lines, Parquet files on S3, tables in PostgreSQL, events on NATS. And the person writing the one-liner is increasingly an AI agent.
zawk is a modern AWK built for that world: zawk = AWK + stdlib + Rust. Version 0.6.6 is out today, and
this post is a tour of what makes it different.