Awka is an open-source implementation of the AWK programming language and is actually two products:
- the AWK to C translator
- a library against which the C code is linked

Awka is not an interpreter like Gawk, Mawk or Nawk, but instead it converts the program to ANSI-C, then compiles this using gcc or a native C compiler to create a binary executable. This means you must have an ANSI C compiler present on your system for Awka to work.