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One-Shot Throwaway awk Programs

Once you are familiar with awk, you will often type in simple programs the moment you want to use them. Then you can write the program as the first argument of the awk command, like this:

awk 'program' input-file1 input-file2 ...

where program consists of a series of patterns and actions, as described earlier.

This command format instructs the shell, or command interpreter, to start awk and use the program to process records in the input file(s). There are single quotes around program so the shell won't interpret any awk characters as special shell characters. The quotes also cause the shell to treat all of program as a single argument for awk, and allow program to be more than one line long.

This format is also useful for running short or medium-sized awk programs from shell scripts, because it avoids the need for a separate file for the awk program. A self-contained shell script is more reliable because there are no other files to misplace. Some Simple Examples, later in this chapter, presents several short, self-contained programs.