Arnold Robbins, an Atlanta native, is a professional programmer and technical author. He has been working with Unix systems since 1980, when he was introduced to a PDP-11 running a version of Sixth Edition Unix. His experience also includes multiple commercial Unix systems, from Sun, IBM, HP and DEC. He has been working with GNU/Linux systems since 1996. He likes his Macintosh laptop, but it has been commandeered by one of his daughters. Arnold has also been a heavy awk user since 1987, when he became involved with gawk, the GNU project's version of awk. As a member of the POSIX 1003.2 balloting group, he helped shape the POSIX standard for awk.

He is currently the maintainer of gawk and its documentation. O'Reilly has been keeping him busy: He is author and/or coauthor of the bestselling titles: Unix In A Nutshell, Effective awk Programming, sed & awk, Classic Shell Scripting, and several pocket references.