The Unix philosophy of many small tools, powerful in their combination, is evident in the AWK programming language. Its inventors (Al Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan) describe it as a language for syntax-driven pattern matching. Its straightforward syntax and clever selection of useful features make it easy to slice and dice text through one-liners without having to understand parsers and grammars and finite automata. Though its inspiration has spread to general-purpose languages such as Perl, any modern Unix box still has AWK installed and quietly, effectively, working away.