Awk was first included in Version 7 Unix in 1977 and then got a major upgrade in 1985 for Unix System V Release 3.1. After this GNU awk (gawk) was first released in 1988 and other versions of awk have also been written. It is part of the Single Unix Specification and part of the Linux Standard Base specification, so it is pretty much everywhere. Awk uses a pattern-action structure to manipulate numbers and strings and has a lot more power than many people really use it for. With a simple, C inspired syntax it is easy to prototype larger projects or to create self-contained scripts. Starting around gawk version 4.1.0 in 2013 the AWKPATH and AWKLIBPATH environment variables were introduced to allow adding external scripts and compiled libraries to be used to extend gawk without needing to vendor functions. Come see how easy it really is to extend gawk and create your own scripts and plugins.