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1.1.3 Running Long Programs
Sometimes your awk
programs can be very long. In this case, it is
more convenient to put the program into a separate file. In order to tell
awk
to use that file for its program, you type:
awk -f source-file input-file1 input-file2 … |
The ‘-f’ instructs the awk
utility to get the awk
program
from the file source-file. Any file name can be used for
source-file. For example, you could put the program:
BEGIN { print "Don't Panic!" } |
into the file ‘advice’. Then this command:
awk -f advice |
does the same thing as this one:
awk "BEGIN { print \"Don't Panic!\" }" |
This was explained earlier
(see section Running awk
Without Input Files).
Note that you don’t usually need single quotes around the file name that you
specify with ‘-f’, because most file names don’t contain any of the shell’s
special characters. Notice that in ‘advice’, the awk
program did not have single quotes around it. The quotes are only needed
for programs that are provided on the awk
command line.
If you want to clearly identify your awk
program files as such,
you can add the extension ‘.awk’ to the file name. This doesn’t
affect the execution of the awk
program but it does make
“housekeeping” easier.
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