Expressions are the basic building blocks of awk patterns
and actions. An expression evaluates to a value, which you can print, test,
store in a variable or pass to a function. Additionally, an expression
can assign a new value to a variable or a field, with an assignment operator.
An expression can serve as a pattern or action statement on its own.
Most other kinds of
statements contain one or more expressions which specify data on which to
operate. As in other languages, expressions in awk include
variables, array references, constants, and function calls, as well as
combinations of these with various operators.
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