Walk is a small language for writing short programs that chew through text. It follows Awk closely - most everyday Awk programs should give the same output when you run them under Walk.
Worth a look if you want:
- CSV and TSV that behave. Quoted and escaped fields split into
$1,$2, … the way you'd hope, with no shell pipeline in front to clean things up first. - More speed. Walk grows out of the work behind other Awk clones (e.g. frawk, zawk), and is built in Rust.
- Batteries included. The whole Awk language, plus a standard library for the bits Awk leaves you to write by hand each time.
- A drop-in for Node. Ships as WASM on npm, so you can embed it in a JavaScript project rather than shelling out to awk.
Still early, so sharp edges are likely.
References