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next Statement
The next statement forces awk to immediately stop processing
the current record and go on to the next record. This means that no
further rules are executed for the current record. The rest of the
current rule's action is not executed either.
Contrast this with the effect of the getline function
(see section Explicit Input with getline). That too causes
awk to read the next record immediately, but it does not alter the
flow of control in any way. So the rest of the current action executes
with a new input record.
At the highest level, awk program execution is a loop that reads
an input record and then tests each rule's pattern against it. If you
think of this loop as a for statement whose body contains the
rules, then the next statement is analogous to a continue
statement: it skips to the end of the body of this implicit loop, and
executes the increment (which reads another record).
For example, if your awk program works only on records with four
fields, and you don't want it to fail when given bad input, you might
use this rule near the beginning of the program:
NF != 4 {
printf("line %d skipped: doesn't have 4 fields", FNR) > "/dev/stderr"
next
}
so that the following rules will not see the bad record. The error message is redirected to the standard error output stream, as error messages should be. See section Standard I/O Streams.
According to the POSIX standard, the behavior is undefined if
the next statement is used in a BEGIN or END rule.
gawk will treat it as a syntax error.
If the next statement causes the end of the input to be reached,
then the code in the END rules, if any, will be executed.
See section BEGIN and END Special Patterns.
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