Running gawk (The GNU Awk User’s Guide)

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1.1 How to Run awk Programs

There are several ways to run an awk program. If the program is short, it is easiest to include it in the command that runs awk, like this:

awk 'program' input-file1 input-file2 …

When the program is long, it is usually more convenient to put it in a file and run it with a command like this:

awk -f program-file input-file1 input-file2 …

This section discusses both mechanisms, along with several variations of each.

• One-shot		Running a short throwaway awk program.
• Read Terminal		Using no input files (input from the keyboard instead).
• Long		Putting permanent awk programs in files.
• Executable Scripts		Making self-contained awk programs.
• Comments		Adding documentation to gawk programs.
• Quoting		More discussion of shell quoting issues.