Humanists who use computers in their research are often faced with a perplexing dilemma. On the one hand, developing tools in programming languages such as Pascal or C is tedious and requires a fairly large amount of specialized knowledge. On the other hand, the software packages available from commercial vendors and other researchers are often unsuited to specific research projects. The humanist, it would seem, needs an environment where he/she can develop powerful tools in a language geared toward simple data and text manipulation. For many researchers, Awk programming under Unix may offer a solution.
With the emergence of interfaces that make Unix more "user-friendly" and inexpensive machines powerful enough to run Unix comfortably, the time has come to re-evaluate the place of Unix in humanities research. The Unix "design philosophy" allows a non-expert to put together a number of simple tools for searching, sorting, and other data manipulation tasks (packaged with the Unix operating system) to create an application appropriate to his/her specific task. Although the standard tools included in the Unix "toolbox" are appropriate for many applications, the user often