Gawk/Printing

5 Printing Output

One of the most common programming actions is to print, or output, some or all of the input. Use the print statement for simple output, and the printf statement for fancier formatting. The print statement is not limited when computing which 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 Controlling Numeric Output with print.) For printing with specifications, you need the printf statement (see section Using printf Statements for Fancier Printing).

Besides basic and formatted printing, this chapter also covers I/O redirections to files and pipes, introduces the special file names that gawk processes internally, and discusses the close() built-in function.

• Print		The `print` statement.
• Print Examples		Simple examples of `print` statements.
• Output Separators		The output separators and how to change them.
• OFMT		Controlling Numeric Output With `print`.
• Printf		The `printf` statement.
• Redirection		How to redirect output to multiple files and pipes.
• Special FD		Special files for I/O.
• Special Files		File name interpretation in `gawk`. `gawk` allows access to inherited file descriptors.
• Close Files And Pipes		Closing Input and Output Files and Pipes.
• Nonfatal		Enabling Nonfatal Output.
• Output Summary		Output summary.
• Output Exercises		Exercises.