GNU Gawk 5.4 Released With New MinRX Regex Matcher, Faster Reading Of Files

Developers behind the widely-used GNU Awk text processing utility today released Gawk 5.4.

Gawk 5.4 is now using the new MinRX regular expression matcher as the default regexp engine. The old regex and DFA engines remain available but the MinRX engine is now used by default. This new matcher was written by Mike Haertel who was the original developer behind GNU grep. The MinRX matcher is fully POSIX compliant unlike the existing GNU matchers.