Intro Summary (The GNU Awk User’s Guide)

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1.9 Summary

• Programs in awk consist of pattern–action pairs.
• An action without a pattern always runs. The default action for a pattern without one is ‘{ print $0 }’.
• Use either ‘awk 'program' files’ or ‘awk -f program-file files’ to run awk.
• You may use the special ‘#!’ header line to create awk programs that are directly executable.
• Comments in awk programs start with ‘#’ and continue to the end of the same line.
• Be aware of quoting issues when writing awk programs as part of a larger shell script (or MS-Windows batch file).
• You may use backslash continuation to continue a source line. Lines are automatically continued after a comma, open brace, question mark, colon, ‘||’, ‘&&’, do, and else.