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The exit Statement

The exit statement causes awk to immediately stop executing the current rule and to stop processing input; any remaining input is ignored.

If an exit statement is executed from a BEGIN rule the program stops processing everything immediately. No input records are read. However, if an END rule is present, it is executed (see section BEGIN and END Special Patterns).

If exit is used as part of an END rule, it causes the program to stop immediately.

An exit statement that is part of an ordinary rule (that is, not part of a BEGIN or END rule) stops the execution of any further automatic rules, but the END rule is executed if there is one. If you do not want the END rule to do its job in this case, you can set a variable to nonzero before the exit statement, and check that variable in the END rule.

If an argument is supplied to exit, its value is used as the exit status code for the awk process. If no argument is supplied, exit returns status zero (success).

For example, let's say you've discovered an error condition you really don't know how to handle. Conventionally, programs report this by exiting with a nonzero status. Your awk program can do this using an exit statement with a nonzero argument. Here's an example of this:

BEGIN {
       if (("date" | getline date_now) < 0) {
         print "Can't get system date" > "/dev/stderr"
         exit 4
       }
}

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