Plain English text processing for the Unix pipeline.
aiwk is a command-line tool that lets you describe what you want in plain English and executes it as an awk program under the hood. It lives natively in your shell pipeline.
cat access.log | aiwk "sum the bytes transferred, grouped by IP address"Describe the transformation; aiwk generates and runs awk. You see the generated program by default. Works with pipes like any other CLI tool.
Binaries
# macOS
brew tap gehadelrobey/aiwk && brew install aiwk
# Linux
curl -sSL https://github.com/gehadelrobey/aiwk/releases/latest/download/install.sh | shGo
go install github.com/gehadelrobey/aiwk/cmd/aiwk@latestSource (Go 1.21+): clone the repo, then go build -o aiwk ./cmd/aiwk.
Needs POSIX awk and an LLM API key:
export AIWK_API_KEY="sk-..."
export AIWK_PROVIDER="anthropic" # openai | anthropic | ollama (defaults to openai)cat data.txt | aiwk "print the second column"
cat /etc/passwd | aiwk -F: "print the username and home directory"
cat sales.csv | aiwk --csv -F, "total revenue in column 4"
aiwk --dry-run "filter lines where field 1 starts with ERROR" # print awk only
aiwk --explain "..." # awk + inline comments
aiwk --to-awk "..." > script.awk && awk -f script.awk data.txt| Flag | Meaning |
|---|---|
-F <sep> |
Field separator (same as awk) |
--csv |
Parse stdin as CSV, then awk on fields |
--dry-run |
Print generated awk, do not run |
--explain |
Generated awk with comments |
--confirm |
Approve before running |
--to-awk |
Raw awk only |
--model, --provider |
LLM backend |
--no-cache, --clear-cache |
Cache control |
--verbose |
Timing, tokens, cache on stderr |
--version |
Version |
Your prompt (and flags like -F) go to the configured LLM → it returns awk → syntax-checked (awk --lint) → retried on failure → executed on stdin → cached in SQLite for reuse.
Issues and PRs welcome; larger changes are easier if discussed first. go test ./... and CI (go vet, go test -race) should pass.
MIT — see LICENSE.