The print Statement

The print statement does output with simple, standardized formatting. You specify only the strings or numbers to be printed, in a list separated by commas. They are output, separated by single spaces, followed by a newline. The statement looks like this:

print item1, item2, ...

The entire list of items may optionally be enclosed in parentheses. The parentheses are necessary if any of the item expressions uses the `>' relational operator; otherwise it could be confused with a redirection (see section Redirecting Output of print and printf).

The items to be printed can be constant strings or numbers, fields of the current record (such as $1), variables, or any awk expressions. Numeric values are converted to strings, and then printed.

The print statement is completely general for computing what values to print. However, with two exceptions, you cannot specify how to print them--how many columns, whether to use exponential notation or not, and so on. (For the exceptions, see section Output Separators, and section Controlling Numeric Output with print.) For that, you need the printf statement (see section Using printf Statements for Fancier Printing).

The simple statement `print' with no items is equivalent to `print $0': it prints the entire current record. To print a blank line, use `print ""', where "" is the empty string.

To print a fixed piece of text, use a string constant such as "Don't Panic" as one item. If you forget to use the double-quote characters, your text will be taken as an awk expression, and you will probably get an error. Keep in mind that a space is printed between any two items.

Each print statement makes at least one line of output. But it isn't limited to one line. If an item value is a string that contains a newline, the newline is output along with the rest of the string. A single print can make any number of lines this way.

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