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