an extension to Brian Kernighan's awk, with added support for several common biological data formats, including optionally gzip'ed BED, GFF, SAM, VCF, FASTA/Q, and TAB-delimited formats with column names along with new built-in functions and a command line option to use TAB as the input/output delimiter. When the new functionality is not used, bioawk should behave exactly like the original BWK awk.