[SOLVED] How to read a file inside AWK?

NabiVakili · 04-13-2011, 11:07 PM

I want to read content of a file inside a gawk script.
I know that by using "gawk -f filename" I can read a file, but I want to do that inside the script.

How can I do that?

penguiniator · 04-13-2011, 11:33 PM

From google:"gawk read file":

http://web.mit.edu/gnu/doc/html/gawk_5.html#SEC29

getline < file

grail · 04-14-2011, 02:38 AM

When you say inside a script ... are you talking inside an awk script or inside a shell script?

jschiwal · 04-14-2011, 02:51 AM

Look at the manpage of awk. "awk -f awkscript"
The filename argument after the -f option is the awk script to run, not the file or files to scan.

Awk reads the file(s) in the argument, or from the pipe input. That is how it works. If you need to explicitly read a lines from a file, look at "getline()" in the gawk info file. This is an advanced usage that you probably don't need.

I'd highly recommend downloading the pdf version of the gawk manual "Gawk: Effective Awk Programming": www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.pdf

kurumi · 04-14-2011, 03:18 AM

to read one line from a file, use

Code:

getline < "file"

to read a file from inside awk

Code:

awk 'BEGIN{
  while(( getline line<"file") > 0 ) {
     print line
  }
}

NabiVakili · 04-15-2011, 11:01 PM

got it!
thanks all...

I want to read a file inside an awk script, and I used "getline < file", it works.

grail · 04-16-2011, 02:22 AM

You do also realise you can pass as many file names as you like directly to your script?

Code:

awk '<do stuff>' file1 file2 ...

audriusk · 04-17-2011, 03:44 PM

When I needed to write self-contained AWK script that would process the same file each time it was invoked (say, from /proc filesystem), I did the following:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f

BEGIN {
    # ARGV[0] is the filename of the script itself.
    ARGV[1] = "/path/to/file"
    # Set ARGV length.
    ARGC = 2
}

This way it behaves as if the file was provided as command line argument.

Should work for more than one file, but I haven't tried that.