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awk Programs
Once you are familiar with awk, you will often type simple
programs at 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 to start awk and use the
program to process records in the input file(s). There are single
quotes around program so that the shell doesn't interpret any
awk characters as special shell characters. They 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 since there are no other files to misplace.
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