awk, mawk, nawk, gawk... WHAT?

Solution 1:

awk - the most common and will be found on most Unix-like systems, oldest version and inferior to newer ones.

mawk - fast AWK implementation which it's code base is based on a byte-code interpreter.

nawk - while the AWK language was being developed the authors released a new version (hence the n - new awk) to avoid confusion. Think of it like the Python 3.0 of AWK.

gawk - abbreviated from GNU awk. The only version in which the developers attempted to add i18n support. Allowed users to write their own C shared libraries to extend it with their own "plug-ins". This version is the standard implementation for Linux, original AWK was written for Unix v7.

There are other versions like jawk (java implementation), bwk (Brian W. Kernighan's implementation) and so on.

Solution 2:

You can just use awk. It is defined by POSIX and therefore has to exist on all POSIX-conformant systems.

The -F parameter is mandated by that as well.