mawk (fast awk implementation)

mawk (Mike's AWK) is an interpreter for the AWK Programming
Language. It's a very fast AWK implementation based on a bytecode
interpreter. Originally written by Mike Brennan, mawk is currently
maintained by Thomas E. Dickey.

The AWK language is useful for manipulation of data files, text
retrieval and processing, and for prototyping and experimenting with
algorithms. mawk is a new awk meaning it implements the AWK language as
defined in Aho, Kernighan and Weinberger, The AWK Programming Language,
Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1988.

mawk conforms to the Posix 1003.2 (draft 11.3) definition of the AWK
language which contains a few features not described in the AWK book,
and mawk provides a small number of extensions.

This build does not conflict with Slackware's own awk (from the gawk
package).

By default, mawk is built using its own built-in regular expression
engine. In recent mawk versions, the only user-visible difference
between the built-in and glibc regex engines is that the glibc engine
doesn't support embedded NUL characters (can't use \x00 to match a
NUL, for instance). If there are other difference in usage, they are
undocumented. If you require the glibc engine, export BUILTIN_REGEX=no
in the script's environment.
