File: gawk.info,  Node: Printing,  Next: Expressions,  Prev: Reading Files,  Up: Top

5 Printing Output
*****************

One of the most common programming actions is to "print", or output,
some or all of the input.  Use the 'print' statement for simple output,
and the 'printf' statement for fancier formatting.  The 'print'
statement is not limited when computing _which_ values to print.
However, with two exceptions, you cannot specify _how_ to print
them--how many columns, whether to use exponential notation or not, and
so on.  (For the exceptions, *note Output Separators:: and *note
OFMT::.)  For printing with specifications, you need the 'printf'
statement (*note Printf::).

   Besides basic and formatted printing, this major node also covers I/O
redirections to files and pipes, introduces the special file names that
'gawk' processes internally, and discusses the 'close()' built-in
function.

* Menu:

* Print::                       The 'print' statement.
* Print Examples::              Simple examples of 'print' statements.
* Output Separators::           The output separators and how to change them.
* OFMT::                        Controlling Numeric Output With 'print'.
* Printf::                      The 'printf' statement.
* Redirection::                 How to redirect output to multiple files and
                                pipes.
* Special FD::                  Special files for I/O.
* Special Files::               File name interpretation in 'gawk'.
                                'gawk' allows access to inherited file
                                descriptors.
* Close Files And Pipes::       Closing Input and Output Files and Pipes.
* Nonfatal::                    Enabling Nonfatal Output.
* Output Summary::              Output summary.
* Output Exercises::            Exercises.