Chapter 12. Advanced Features of gawk
Write documentation as if whoever reads it is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
—Steve English, as quoted by Peter Langston
This chapter discusses advanced features in gawk
. It’s a bit of a “grab bag” of items that are
otherwise unrelated to each other. First, we look at a command-line option that allows gawk
to recognize nondecimal numbers in input
data, not just in awk
programs. Then,
gawk
’s special features for sorting
arrays are presented. Next, two-way I/O, discussed briefly in earlier parts
of this book, is described in full detail, along with the basics of TCP/IP
networking. Finally, we see how gawk
can
profile an awk
program, making it possible to tune it for performance.
Additional advanced features are discussed in separate chapters of their own:
Chapter 13, Internationalization with gawk, discusses how to internationalize your
awk
programs, so that they can speak multiple national languages.Chapter 14, Debugging awk Programs, describes
gawk
’s built-in command-line debugger for debuggingawk
programs.Chapter 15, Arithmetic and Arbitrary-Precision Arithmetic with gawk, describes how you can use
gawk
to perform arbitrary-precision arithmetic.Chapter 16, Writing Extensions for gawk, discusses the ability to dynamically add new built-in functions to
gawk
.
Allowing Nondecimal Input Data
If you run gawk
with the
--non-decimal-data
option, you can have nondecimal
values in your input data:
$echo 0123 123 0x123 |
>gawk --non-decimal-data ...
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