Practical AWK Benchmarking: gawk vs mawk vs nawk
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Practical AWK Benchmarking: gawk vs mawk vs nawk

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Gábor Dombay
Feb 19, 2026

This article benchmarks gawk, mawk, and nawk by measuring execution time and memory footprint, using Pareto frontier analysis to evaluate true resource efficiency. The comparison is motivated by Brian Kernighan’s 2025 update to nawk.
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Gábor Dombay

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