Options (The GNU Awk User’s Guide)
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2.2 Command-Line Options
Options begin with a dash and consist of a single character. GNU-style long options consist of two dashes and a keyword. The keyword can be abbreviated, as long as the abbreviation allows the option to be uniquely identified. If the option takes an argument, either the keyword is immediately followed by an equals sign (‘=
’) and the argument’s value, or the keyword and the argument’s value are separated by whitespace (spaces or TABs). If a particular option with a value is given more than once, it is the last value that counts.
Each long option for gawk
has a corresponding POSIX-style short option. The long and short options are interchangeable in all contexts. The following list describes options mandated by the POSIX standard:
-F fs
--field-separator fs
Set the
FS
variable tofs
(see section Specifying How Fields Are Separated).-f source-file
--file source-file
Read the
awk
program source fromsource-file
instead of in the first nonoption argument. This option may be given multiple times; theawk
program consists of the concatenation of the contents of each specifiedsource-file
.Files named with
-f
are treated as if they had ‘@namespace "awk"
’ at their beginning. See section Changing The Namespace, for more information on this advanced feature.-v var=val
--assign var=val
Set the variable
var
to the valueval
before execution of the program begins. Such variable values are available inside theBEGIN
rule (see section Other Command-Line Arguments).The
-v
option can only set one variable, but it can be used more than once, setting another variable each time, like this: ‘awk -v foo=1 -v bar=2 …
’.CAUTION: Using
-v
to set the values of the built-in variables may lead to surprising results.awk
will reset the values of those variables as it needs to, possibly ignoring any initial value you may have given.-W gawk-opt
Provide an implementation-specific option. This is the POSIX convention for providing implementation-specific options. These options also have corresponding GNU-style long options. Note that the long options may be abbreviated, as long as the abbreviations remain unique. The full list of
gawk
-specific options is provided next.--
Signal the end of the command-line options. The following arguments are not treated as options even if they begin with ‘
-
’. This interpretation of--
follows the POSIX argument parsing conventions.This is useful if you have file names that start with ‘
-
’, or in shell scripts, if you have file names that will be specified by the user that could start with ‘-
’. It is also useful for passing options on to theawk
program; see Processing Command-Line Options.
The following list describes gawk
-specific options:
-b
--characters-as-bytes
Cause
gawk
to treat all input data as single-byte characters. In addition, all output written withprint
orprintf
is treated as single-byte characters.Normally,
gawk
follows the POSIX standard and attempts to process its input data according to the current locale (see section Where You Are Makes a Difference). This can often involve converting multibyte characters into wide characters (internally), and can lead to problems or confusion if the input data does not contain valid multibyte characters. This option is an easy way to tellgawk
, “Hands off my data!”-c
--traditional
Specify compatibility mode, in which the GNU extensions to the
awk
language are disabled, so thatgawk
behaves just like BWKawk
. See section Extensions in gawk Not in POSIX awk, which summarizes the extensions. Also see Downward Compatibility and Debugging.-C
--copyright
Print the short version of the General Public License and then exit.
-d
[file
]
--dump-variables
[=
file
]Print a sorted list of global variables, their types, and final values to
file
. If nofile
is provided, print this list to a file namedawkvars.out
in the current directory. No space is allowed between the-d
andfile
, iffile
is supplied.Having a list of all global variables is a good way to look for typographical errors in your programs. You would also use this option if you have a large program with a lot of functions, and you want to be sure that your functions don’t inadvertently use global variables that you meant to be local. (This is a particularly easy mistake to make with simple variable names like
i
,j
, etc.)-D
[file
]
--debug
[=
file
]Enable debugging of
awk
programs (see section Introduction to the gawk Debugger). By default, the debugger reads commands interactively from the keyboard (standard input). The optionalfile
argument allows you to specify a file with a list of commands for the debugger to execute noninteractively. No space is allowed between the-D
andfile
, iffile
is supplied.-e
program-text
--source
program-text
Provide program source code in the
program-text
. This option allows you to mix source code in files with source code that you enter on the command line. This is particularly useful when you have library functions that you want to use from your command-line programs (see section The AWKPATH Environment Variable).Note that
gawk
treats each string as if it ended with a newline character (even if it doesn’t). This makes building the total program easier.CAUTION: Prior to version 5.0, there was no requirement that each
program-text
be a full syntactic unit. I.e., the following worked:$ gawk -e 'BEGIN { a = 5 ;' -e 'print a }' -| 5
However, this is no longer true. If you have any scripts that rely upon this feature, you should revise them.
This is because each
program-text
is treated as if it had ‘@namespace "awk"
’ at its beginning. See section Changing The Namespace, for more information.-E
file
--exec
file
Similar to
-f
, readawk
program text fromfile
. There are two differences from-f
:- This option terminates option processing; anything else on the command line is passed on directly to the
awk
program. - Command-line variable assignments of the form ‘
var=value
’ are disallowed.
This option is particularly necessary for World Wide Web CGI applications that pass arguments through the URL; using this option prevents a malicious (or other) user from passing in options, assignments, or
awk
source code (via-e
) to the CGI application.11 This option should be used with ‘#!
’ scripts (see section Executable awk Programs), like so:#! /usr/local/bin/gawk -E awk program here …
- This option terminates option processing; anything else on the command line is passed on directly to the
-g
--gen-pot
Analyze the source program and generate a GNU
gettext
portable object template file on standard output for all string constants that have been marked for translation. See section Internationalization with gawk, for information about this option.-h
--help
Print a “usage” message summarizing the short- and long-style options that
gawk
accepts and then exit.-i
source-file
--include
source-file
Read an
awk
source library fromsource-file
. This option is completely equivalent to using the@include
directive inside your program. It is very similar to the-f
option, but there are two important differences. First, when-i
is used, the program source is not loaded if it has been previously loaded, whereas with-f
,gawk
always loads the file. Second, because this option is intended to be used with code libraries,gawk
does not recognize such files as constituting main program input. Thus, after processing an-i
argument,gawk
still expects to find the main source code via the-f
option or on the command line.Files named with
-i
are treated as if they had ‘@namespace "awk"
’ at their beginning. See section Changing The Namespace, for more information.-l
ext
--load
ext
Load a dynamic extension named
ext
. Extensions are stored as system shared libraries. This option searches for the library using theAWKLIBPATH
environment variable. The correct library suffix for your platform will be supplied by default, so it need not be specified in the extension name. The extension initialization routine should be nameddl_load()
. An alternative is to use the@load
keyword inside the program to load a shared library. This advanced feature is described in detail in Writing Extensions for gawk.-L
[value
]
--lint
[=
value
]Warn about constructs that are dubious or nonportable to other
awk
implementations. No space is allowed between the-L
andvalue
, ifvalue
is supplied. Some warnings are issued whengawk
first reads your program. Others are issued at runtime, as your program executes. The optional argument may be one of the following:fatal
Cause lint warnings become fatal errors. This may be drastic, but its use will certainly encourage the development of cleaner
awk
programs.invalid
Only issue warnings about things that are actually invalid are issued. (This is not fully implemented yet.)
no-ext
Disable warnings about
gawk
extensions.
Some warnings are only printed once, even if the dubious constructs they warn about occur multiple times in your
awk
program. Thus, when eliminating problems pointed out by--lint
, you should take care to search for all occurrences of each inappropriate construct. Asawk
programs are usually short, doing so is not burdensome.-M
--bignum
Select arbitrary-precision arithmetic on numbers. This option has no effect if
gawk
is not compiled to use the GNU MPFR and MP libraries (see section Arithmetic and Arbitrary-Precision Arithmetic with gawk).-n
--non-decimal-data
Enable automatic interpretation of octal and hexadecimal values in input data (see section Allowing Nondecimal Input Data).
CAUTION: This option can severely break old programs. Use with care. Also note that this option may disappear in a future version of
gawk
.-N
--use-lc-numeric
Force the use of the locale’s decimal point character when parsing numeric input data (see section Where You Are Makes a Difference).
-o
[file
]
--pretty-print
[=
file
]Enable pretty-printing of
awk
programs. Implies--no-optimize
. By default, the output program is created in a file namedawkprof.out
(see section Profiling Your awk Programs). The optionalfile
argument allows you to specify a different file name for the output. No space is allowed between the-o
andfile
, iffile
is supplied.NOTE: In the past, this option would also execute your program. This is no longer the case.
-O
--optimize
Enable
gawk
’s default optimizations on the internal representation of the program. At the moment, this includes just simple constant folding.Optimization is enabled by default. This option remains primarily for backwards compatibility. However, it may be used to cancel the effect of an earlier
-s
option (see later in this list).-p
[file
]
--profile
[=
file
]Enable profiling of
awk
programs (see section Profiling Your awk Programs). Implies--no-optimize
. By default, profiles are created in a file namedawkprof.out
. The optionalfile
argument allows you to specify a different file name for the profile file. No space is allowed between the-p
andfile
, iffile
is supplied.The profile contains execution counts for each statement in the program in the left margin, and function call counts for each function.
-P
--posix
Operate in strict POSIX mode. This disables all
gawk
extensions (just like--traditional
) and disables all extensions not allowed by POSIX. See section Common Extensions Summary for a summary of the extensions ingawk
that are disabled by this option. Also, the following additional restrictions apply:- Newlines are not allowed after ‘
?
’ or ‘:
’ (see section Conditional Expressions). - Specifying ‘
-Ft
’ on the command line does not set the value ofFS
to be a single TAB character (see section Specifying How Fields Are Separated). - The locale’s decimal point character is used for parsing input data (see section Where You Are Makes a Difference).
If you supply both
--traditional
and--posix
on the command line,--posix
takes precedence.gawk
issues a warning if both options are supplied.-r
--re-interval
Allow interval expressions (see section Regular Expression Operators) in regexps. This is now
gawk
’s default behavior. Nevertheless, this option remains (both for backward compatibility and for use in combination with--traditional
).-s
--no-optimize
Disable
gawk
’s default optimizations on the internal representation of the program.-S
--sandbox
Disable the
system()
function, input redirections withgetline
, output redirections withprint
andprintf
, and dynamic extensions. Also, disallow adding filenames toARGV
that were not there whengawk
started running. This is particularly useful when you want to runawk
scripts from questionable sources and need to make sure the scripts can’t access your system (other than the specified input data files).-t
--lint-old
Warn about constructs that are not available in the original version of
awk
from Version 7 Unix (see section Major Changes Between V7 and SVR3.1).-V
--version
Print version information for this particular copy of
gawk
. This allows you to determine if your copy ofgawk
is up to date with respect to whatever the Free Software Foundation is currently distributing. It is also useful for bug reports (see section Reporting Problems and Bugs).--
Mark the end of all options. Any command-line arguments following
--
are placed inARGV
, even if they start with a minus sign.
As long as program text has been supplied, any other options are flagged as invalid with a warning message but are otherwise ignored.
In compatibility mode, as a special case, if the value of fs
supplied to the -F
option is ‘t
’, then FS
is set to the TAB character ("\t"
). This is true only for --traditional
and not for --posix
(see section Specifying How Fields Are Separated).
The -f
option may be used more than once on the command line. If it is, awk
reads its program source from all of the named files, as if they had been concatenated together into one big file. This is useful for creating libraries of awk
functions. These functions can be written once and then retrieved from a standard place, instead of having to be included in each individual program. The -i
option is similar in this regard. (As mentioned in Function Definition Syntax, function names must be unique.)
With standard awk
, library functions can still be used, even if the program is entered at the keyboard, by specifying ‘-f /dev/tty
’. After typing your program, type Ctrl-d (the end-of-file character) to terminate it. (You may also use ‘-f -
’ to read program source from the standard input, but then you will not be able to also use the standard input as a source of data.)
Because it is clumsy using the standard awk
mechanisms to mix source file and command-line awk
programs, gawk
provides the -e
option. This does not require you to preempt the standard input for your source code, and it allows you to easily mix command-line and library source code (see section The AWKPATH Environment Variable). As with -f
, the -e
and -i
options may also be used multiple times on the command line.
If no -f
option (or -e
option for gawk
) is specified, then awk
uses the first nonoption command-line argument as the text of the program source code. Arguments on the command line that follow the program text are entered into the ARGV
array; awk
does not continue to parse the command line looking for options.
If the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT
exists, then gawk
behaves in strict POSIX mode, exactly as if you had supplied --posix
. Many GNU programs look for this environment variable to suppress extensions that conflict with POSIX, but gawk
behaves differently: it suppresses all extensions, even those that do not conflict with POSIX, and behaves in strict POSIX mode. If --lint
is supplied on the command line and gawk
turns on POSIX mode because of POSIXLY_CORRECT
, then it issues a warning message indicating that POSIX mode is in effect. You would typically set this variable in your shell’s startup file. For a Bourne-compatible shell (such as Bash), you would add these lines to the .profile
file in your home directory:
POSIXLY_CORRECT=true export POSIXLY_CORRECT
For a C shell-compatible shell,12 you would add this line to the .login
file in your home directory:
setenv POSIXLY_CORRECT true
Having POSIXLY_CORRECT
set is not recommended for daily use, but it is good for testing the portability of your programs to other environments.
Footnotes
(11)
For more detail, please see Section 4.4 of RFC 3875. Also see the explanatory note sent to the gawk bug mailing list.
(12)
Not recommended.
Next: Other Arguments, Previous: Command Line, Up: Invoking Gawk [Contents][Index]