Library Functions Summary (The GNU Awk User’s Guide)

From Get docs
Gawk/docs/latest/Library-Functions-Summary


10.8 Summary

  • Reading programs is an excellent way to learn Good Programming. The functions and programs provided in this chapter and the next are intended to serve that purpose.
  • When writing general-purpose library functions, put some thought into how to name any global variables so that they won’t conflict with variables from a user’s program.
  • The functions presented here fit into the following categories: General problems Number-to-string conversion, testing assertions, rounding, random number generation, converting characters to numbers, joining strings, getting easily usable time-of-day information, and reading a whole file in one shot Managing data files Noting data file boundaries, rereading the current file, checking for readable files, checking for zero-length files, and treating assignments as file names Processing command-line options An awk version of the standard C getopt() function Reading the user and group databases Two sets of routines that parallel the C library versions Traversing arrays of arrays Two functions that traverse an array of arrays to any depth