This document circulated widely on USENET in the mid-1980s.
At the time, there was only the fairly skimpy documentation on
awk that came with V7 Unix. This document provided a
number of additional details about how awk worked.
I've included a note from Mark Weiser about using double instead
of float.
The current version was retrieved from https://article.olduse.net/4070%40sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU. It has few additional bits of info from the first version I put into this repository.
John Pierce's note from 1989 about his document is also included. It came from https://article.olduse.net/431%40chem.ucsd.EDU also. Thanks to Adam Sjøgren for finding these two items.
I'm putting the document up on GitHub to preserve this interesting bit of Unix / USENET history.
Arnold Robbins
Sun Feb 8 11:38:01 AM IST 2026