Getline/Variable/Pipe (The GNU Awk User’s Guide)
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Gawk/docs/latest/Getline 002fVariable 002fPipe
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4.10.6 Using getline into a Variable from a Pipe
When you use ‘command | getline var
’, the output of command
is sent through a pipe to getline
and into the variable var
. For example, the following program reads the current date and time into the variable current_time
, using the date
utility, and then prints it:
BEGIN { "date" | getline current_time close("date") print "Report printed on " current_time }
In this version of getline
, none of the predefined variables are changed and the record is not split into fields. However, RT
is set.