Arnold Robbins is a native of Atlanta who now resides in Israel. He is the delighted father of four gorgeous children and a loving spouse. He is a software engineer and technical author by profession. He is also an amateur Talmudist, both Babylonian and Jerusalem, in his leisure time. Since 1980, Arnold has worked with numerous Unix systems, GNU/Linux systems, C, C++, and all of the other key Unix tools.

He has been the maintainer of GAWK (GNU Awk) for many years as a long-time volunteer for the GNU project. In the early 1990s, Arnold served on the balloting committee for the initial POSIX Shell and Utilities standard, and he helped develop the POSIX standard for awk (and a few other things).