One-shot (The GNU Awk User’s Guide)
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1.1.1 One-Shot Throwaway awk Programs
Once you are familiar with awk
, you will often type in simple programs the moment you want to use them. Then you can write the program as the first argument of the awk
command, like this:
awk 'program' input-file1 input-file2 …
where program
consists of a series of patterns and actions, as described earlier.
This command format instructs the shell, or command interpreter, to start awk
and use the program
to process records in the input file(s). There are single quotes around program
so the shell won’t interpret any awk
characters as special shell characters. The quotes also cause the shell to treat all of program
as a single argument for awk
, and allow program
to be more than one line long.
This format is also useful for running short or medium-sized awk
programs from shell scripts, because it avoids the need for a separate file for the awk
program. A self-contained shell script is more reliable because there are no other files to misplace.
Later in this chapter, in Some Simple Examples, we’ll see examples of several short, self-contained programs.