This article spotlights alternative tools to awk, software specialized for textual data manipulation. It reads a text file line by line, and for each line that matches a pattern expression, it executes an action (which normally prints output).
The software featured here is free and open source. All tools provide a command-line interface (CLI) unless otherwise stated.
| 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 |
Are we missing any open source alternatives to awk? Please let us know.
All the CLI tools in this series.
| Alternatives to CLI tools |
|---|
| age // awk // bc // cal // cat // cd // chmod // cksum // cloc // cmp // compress // cp // cron // curl // cut // date // dd // df // diff // dig // du // fdisk // file // find // free // ftp // grep // gzip // hexdump // history // jq // kill // less // locate // ls // lsof // make // man // more // mv / ping // ps // psql // rename // rm // sed // split // ssh // stow // strings // sudo // sysctl // tail // talk // tar // telnet // time // top // touch // traceroute // tree // uname // uniq // uptime // vi // watch // Wget // who // whois // xargs |
 Explore our carefully curated directory of recommended free and open source software, covering every major software category.The directory forms part of our extensive collection of articles for Linux enthusiasts. It includes hundreds of detailed reviews, together with free and open source alternatives to proprietary software from companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. LinuxLinks also covers interesting projects worth exploring, Linux-compatible hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful free and open source Linux application that we haven’t covered? Tell us about it using our submission form. |
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.
mawk?
Thanks, I’ve added mawk.
I suggest rawk, wak, PAWK, and Hawk
Thanks Jensen, they will be added over the next few days.