Comments in awk Programs

A comment is some text that is included in a program for the sake of human readers; it is not really part of the program. Comments can explain what the program does, and how it works. Nearly all programming languages have provisions for comments, because programs are typically hard to understand without their extra help.

In the awk language, a comment starts with the sharp sign character, `#', and continues to the end of the line. The `#' does not have to be the first character on the line. The awk language ignores the rest of a line following a sharp sign. For example, we could have put the following into `advice':

# This program prints a nice friendly message.  It helps
# keep novice users from being afraid of the computer.
BEGIN    { print "Don't Panic!" }

You can put comment lines into keyboard-composed throw-away awk programs also, but this usually isn't very useful; the purpose of a comment is to help you or another person understand the program at a later time.

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