Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.


Running awk

There are two ways to run awk: with an explicit program, or with one or more program files. Here are templates for both of them; items enclosed in `[...]' in these templates are optional.

Besides traditional one-letter POSIX-style options, gawk also supports GNU long options.

awk [options] -f progfile [--] file ...
awk [options] [--] 'program' file ...

It is possible to invoke awk with an empty program:

$ awk '' datafile1 datafile2

Doing so makes little sense though; awk will simply exit silently when given an empty program (d.c.). If `--lint' has been specified on the command line, gawk will issue a warning that the program is empty.


Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.