Gawk/Invoking-Summary
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2.11 Summary
gawk
parses arguments on the command line, left to right, to determine if they should be treated as options or as non-option arguments.gawk
recognizes several options which control its operation, as described in Command-Line Options. All options begin with ‘-
’.- Any argument that is not recognized as an option is treated as a non-option argument, even if it begins with ‘
-
’.- - However, when an option itself requires an argument, and the option is separated from that argument on the command line by at least one space, the space is ignored, and the argument is considered to be related to the option. Thus, in the invocation, ‘
gawk -F x
’, the ‘x
’ is treated as belonging to the-F
option, not as a separate non-option argument.
- - However, when an option itself requires an argument, and the option is separated from that argument on the command line by at least one space, the space is ignored, and the argument is considered to be related to the option. Thus, in the invocation, ‘
- Once
gawk
finds a non-option argument, it stops looking for options. Therefore, all following arguments are also non-option arguments, even if they resemble recognized options. - If no
-e
or-f
options are present,gawk
expects the program text to be in the first non-option argument. - All non-option arguments, except program text provided in the first non-option argument, are placed in
ARGV
as explained in UsingARGC
andARGV
, and are processed as described in Other Command-Line Arguments. AdjustingARGC
andARGV
affects howawk
processes input. - The three standard options for all versions of
awk
are-f
,-F
, and-v
.gawk
supplies these and many others, as well as corresponding GNU-style long options. - Nonoption command-line arguments are usually treated as file names, unless they have the form ‘
var=value
’, in which case they are taken as variable assignments to be performed at that point in processing the input. - You can use a single minus sign (‘
-
’) to refer to standard input on the command line.gawk
also lets you use the special file name/dev/stdin
. gawk
pays attention to a number of environment variables.AWKPATH
,AWKLIBPATH
, andPOSIXLY_CORRECT
are the most important ones.gawk
’s exit status conveys information to the program that invoked it. Use theexit
statement from within anawk
program to set the exit status.gawk
allows you to include otherawk
source files into your program using the@include
statement and/or the-i
and-f
command-line options.gawk
allows you to load additional functions written in C or C++ using the@load
statement and/or the-l
option. (This advanced feature is described later, in Writing Extensions forgawk
.)
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