AWK is a computer language which helps people understand and use data. It is like a tool for sorting, searching, and manipulating data. It is mainly used to process files that have lots of different types of information in them, such as text files with numbers and words. With AWK, you can make a list of the information in the file and tell it how to use the data. For example, you could ask it to arrange the numbers in alphabetical or numerical order, or to keep only certain words or lines in the file.