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You're reading from  Learning AWK Programming

Product typeBook
Published inMar 2018
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781788391030
Edition1st Edition
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Shiwang Kalkhanda
Shiwang Kalkhanda
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Shiwang Kalkhanda

Shiwang Kalkhanda (RHCA, RHCSS, MCSE) is a Linux geek and consultant with expertise in the automation of infrastructure deployment and management. He has more than 10 years' experience in security, system, and network administration, and training on open source tech. For most of his automation work, he uses Shell Scripting, Python, and Go. He holds a master's and a bachelor's degree in computer applications. He enjoys traveling and spending time with his children. He is also the author of a book on text processing utilities in Unix-like environments, Learning Awk Programming.
Read more about Shiwang Kalkhanda

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Role of output separator in print statement

When we print multiple fields separated by comma using print command, it uses OFS and ORS built-in variable values to decide how to print the fields and rows. Output field separator is stored in the OFS variable and output record separator is stored in the ORS variable. By default OFS is set to single space and ORS is set to a single newline. We can change these values anytime as required, but the usually best place to assign new values to OFS and ORS is in the BEGIN statement. For example, in the following example we print all the fields of car database with a colon between them as separator, and the two newlines after each processing record as follows:

$ vi output_separator.awk

BEGIN { OFS = ":"
ORS = "\n\n"
}
{ print $1,$2,$3,$4,$5 }

$ awk -f output_separator.awk cars.dat

The output on execution of the...

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Learning AWK Programming
Published in: Mar 2018Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781788391030

Author (1)

author image
Shiwang Kalkhanda

Shiwang Kalkhanda (RHCA, RHCSS, MCSE) is a Linux geek and consultant with expertise in the automation of infrastructure deployment and management. He has more than 10 years' experience in security, system, and network administration, and training on open source tech. For most of his automation work, he uses Shell Scripting, Python, and Go. He holds a master's and a bachelor's degree in computer applications. He enjoys traveling and spending time with his children. He is also the author of a book on text processing utilities in Unix-like environments, Learning Awk Programming.
Read more about Shiwang Kalkhanda