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命令用途

awk 是一个强大的文本处理工具,广泛用于模式扫描和处理任务。它能够逐行读取输入,匹配模式并执行相应的动作。awk 被设计用于在输入数据中根据特定模式进行搜索、筛选和处理,常用于日志分析、数据处理等场景。

常用用法示例

  1. 打印文件中的每一行

    1
    awk '{print}' filename

    该命令将文件 filename 中的每一行打印出来。

  2. 打印特定字段

    1
    awk '{print $1}' filename

    该命令打印文件中每一行的第一个字段(以空格或制表符为分隔符)。

  3. 根据条件筛选并打印匹配的行

    1
    awk '$1 == "John" {print $0}' filename

    该命令筛选出第一列为 “John” 的行,并打印整个行。

  4. 计算文件中第二列的和

    1
    awk '{sum += $2} END {print sum}' filename

    该命令计算文件中第二列所有数值的总和。

  5. 以逗号分隔的文件中打印特定字段

    1
    awk -F, '{print $3}' filename

    该命令将字段分隔符设置为逗号,并打印每行的第三个字段。

  6. 打印匹配多个条件的行

    1
    awk '$1 == "John" && $2 > 50 {print $0}' filename

    该命令筛选出第一列为 “John” 且第二列大于50的行。

  7. 打印每行的行号

    1
    awk '{print NR, $0}' filename

    该命令打印文件中每一行的行号和内容。

  8. 替换字段中的内容

    1
    awk '{gsub(/apple/, "orange"); print $0}' filename

    该命令将每行中的 “apple” 替换为 “orange” 并打印结果。

常用参数选项

  1. -F sepstring
    设置输入字段分隔符。
    awk -F”:” ‘{print $1}’ filename
    将字段分隔符设置为冒号,打印文件中每行的第一个字段。

  2. -f progfile
    指定包含 awk 程序的文件。
    awk -f program.awk filename
    从 program.awk 文件中读取 awk 程序,并应用于文件 filename。

  3. -v assignment
    在执行 awk 程序前先进行变量赋值。
    awk -v var=10 ‘{print var}’ filename
    为 var 变量赋值为 10,并打印该变量的值。

  4. -v FS=sepstring
    设置输入记录的字段分隔符。
    awk -v FS=”;” ‘{print $1}’ filename
    将字段分隔符设置为分号,并打印每行的第一个字段。

  5. BEGIN
    在处理输入文件之前执行的代码块。
    awk ‘BEGIN {print “Start Processing”} {print $1}’ filename
    在处理文件之前,先打印 “Start Processing”。

  6. END
    在处理完输入文件之后执行的代码块。
    awk ‘END {print “Processing Completed”}’ filename
    在处理完所有行后打印 “Processing Completed”。

  7. -F,
    指定逗号作为字段分隔符。
    awk -F, ‘{print $2}’ filename
    将字段分隔符设置为逗号,并打印第二个字段。

  8. NR
    表示当前行号。
    awk ‘{print NR, $0}’ filename
    打印每行的行号及其内容。

原厂文档

PROLOG

   This manual page is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual.  The
   Linux implementation of this interface may differ (consult the
   corresponding Linux manual page for details of Linux behavior), or
   the interface may not be implemented on Linux.

NAME

   awk — pattern scanning and processing language

SYNOPSIS

   awk [-F sepstring] [-v assignment]... program [argument...]

   awk [-F sepstring] -f progfile [-f progfile]... [-v assignment]...
        [argument...]

DESCRIPTION

   The awk utility shall execute programs written in the awk
   programming language, which is specialized for textual data
   manipulation. An awk program is a sequence of patterns and
   corresponding actions. When input is read that matches a pattern,
   the action associated with that pattern is carried out.

   Input shall be interpreted as a sequence of records. By default, a
   record is a line, less its terminating <newline>, but this can be
   changed by using the RS built-in variable. Each record of input
   shall be matched in turn against each pattern in the program. For
   each pattern matched, the associated action shall be executed.

   The awk utility shall interpret each input record as a sequence of
   fields where, by default, a field is a string of non-<blank>
   non-<newline> characters. This default <blank> and <newline> field
   delimiter can be changed by using the FS built-in variable or the
   -F sepstring option. The awk utility shall denote the first field
   in a record $1, the second $2, and so on. The symbol $0 shall
   refer to the entire record; setting any other field causes the re-
   evaluation of $0. Assigning to $0 shall reset the values of all
   other fields and the NF built-in variable.

OPTIONS

   The awk utility shall conform to the Base Definitions volume of
   POSIX.1‐2017, Section 12.2, Utility Syntax Guidelines.

   The following options shall be supported:

   -F sepstring
             Define the input field separator. This option shall be
             equivalent to:

                 -v FS=sepstring

             except that if -F sepstring and -v FS=sepstring are both
             used, it is unspecified whether the FS assignment
             resulting from -F sepstring is processed in command line
             order or is processed after the last -v FS=sepstring.
             See the description of the FS built-in variable, and how
             it is used, in the EXTENDED DESCRIPTION section.

   -f progfile
             Specify the pathname of the file progfile containing an
             awk program. A pathname of '-' shall denote the standard
             input. If multiple instances of this option are
             specified, the concatenation of the files specified as
             progfile in the order specified shall be the awk
             program. The awk program can alternatively be specified
             in the command line as a single argument.

   -v assignment
             The application shall ensure that the assignment
             argument is in the same form as an assignment operand.
             The specified variable assignment shall occur prior to
             executing the awk program, including the actions
             associated with BEGIN patterns (if any). Multiple
             occurrences of this option can be specified.

OPERANDS

   The following operands shall be supported:

   program   If no -f option is specified, the first operand to awk
             shall be the text of the awk program. The application
             shall supply the program operand as a single argument to
             awk.  If the text does not end in a <newline>, awk shall
             interpret the text as if it did.

   argument  Either of the following two types of argument can be
             intermixed:

             file      A pathname of a file that contains the input
                       to be read, which is matched against the set
                       of patterns in the program. If no file
                       operands are specified, or if a file operand
                       is '-', the standard input shall be used.

             assignment
                       An operand that begins with an <underscore> or
                       alphabetic character from the portable
                       character set (see the table in the Base
                       Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Section
                       6.1, Portable Character Set), followed by a
                       sequence of underscores, digits, and
                       alphabetics from the portable character set,
                       followed by the '=' character, shall specify a
                       variable assignment rather than a pathname.
                       The characters before the '=' represent the
                       name of an awk variable; if that name is an
                       awk reserved word (see Grammar) the behavior
                       is undefined. The characters following the
                       <equals-sign> shall be interpreted as if they
                       appeared in the awk program preceded and
                       followed by a double-quote ('"') character, as
                       a STRING token (see Grammar), except that if
                       the last character is an unescaped
                       <backslash>, it shall be interpreted as a
                       literal <backslash> rather than as the first
                       character of the sequence "\"".  The variable
                       shall be assigned the value of that STRING
                       token and, if appropriate, shall be considered
                       a numeric string (see Expressions in awk), the
                       variable shall also be assigned its numeric
                       value. Each such variable assignment shall
                       occur just prior to the processing of the
                       following file, if any. Thus, an assignment
                       before the first file argument shall be
                       executed after the BEGIN actions (if any),
                       while an assignment after the last file
                       argument shall occur before the END actions
                       (if any). If there are no file arguments,
                       assignments shall be executed before
                       processing the standard input.

STDIN

   The standard input shall be used only if no file operands are
   specified, or if a file operand is '-', or if a progfile option-
   argument is '-'; see the INPUT FILES section. If the awk program
   contains no actions and no patterns, but is otherwise a valid awk
   program, standard input and any file operands shall not be read
   and awk shall exit with a return status of zero.

INPUT FILES

   Input files to the awk program from any of the following sources
   shall be text files:

    *  Any file operands or their equivalents, achieved by modifying
       the awk variables ARGV and ARGC

    *  Standard input in the absence of any file operands

    *  Arguments to the getline function

   Whether the variable RS is set to a value other than a <newline>
   or not, for these files, implementations shall support records
   terminated with the specified separator up to {LINE_MAX} bytes and
   may support longer records.

   If -f progfile is specified, the application shall ensure that the
   files named by each of the progfile option-arguments are text
   files and their concatenation, in the same order as they appear in
   the arguments, is an awk program.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

   The following environment variables shall affect the execution of
   awk:

   LANG      Provide a default value for the internationalization
             variables that are unset or null. (See the Base
             Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Section 8.2,
             Internationalization Variables for the precedence of
             internationalization variables used to determine the
             values of locale categories.)

   LC_ALL    If set to a non-empty string value, override the values
             of all the other internationalization variables.

   LC_COLLATE
             Determine the locale for the behavior of ranges,
             equivalence classes, and multi-character collating
             elements within regular expressions and in comparisons
             of string values.

   LC_CTYPE  Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences
             of bytes of text data as characters (for example,
             single-byte as opposed to multi-byte characters in
             arguments and input files), the behavior of character
             classes within regular expressions, the identification
             of characters as letters, and the mapping of uppercase
             and lowercase characters for the toupper and tolower
             functions.

   LC_MESSAGES
             Determine the locale that should be used to affect the
             format and contents of diagnostic messages written to
             standard error.

   LC_NUMERIC
             Determine the radix character used when interpreting
             numeric input, performing conversions between numeric
             and string values, and formatting numeric output.
             Regardless of locale, the <period> character (the
             decimal-point character of the POSIX locale) is the
             decimal-point character recognized in processing awk
             programs (including assignments in command line
             arguments).

   NLSPATH   Determine the location of message catalogs for the
             processing of LC_MESSAGES.

   PATH      Determine the search path when looking for commands
             executed by system(expr), or input and output pipes; see
             the Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter 8,
             Environment Variables.

   In addition, all environment variables shall be visible via the
   awk variable ENVIRON.

ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS

   Default.

STDOUT

   The nature of the output files depends on the awk program.

STDERR

   The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages.

OUTPUT FILES

   The nature of the output files depends on the awk program.

EXTENDED DESCRIPTION

Overall Program Structure
An awk program is composed of pairs of the form:

       pattern { action }

   Either the pattern or the action (including the enclosing brace
   characters) can be omitted.

   A missing pattern shall match any record of input, and a missing
   action shall be equivalent to:

       { print }

   Execution of the awk program shall start by first executing the
   actions associated with all BEGIN patterns in the order they occur
   in the program. Then each file operand (or standard input if no
   files were specified) shall be processed in turn by reading data
   from the file until a record separator is seen (<newline> by
   default). Before the first reference to a field in the record is
   evaluated, the record shall be split into fields, according to the
   rules in Regular Expressions, using the value of FS that was
   current at the time the record was read. Each pattern in the
   program then shall be evaluated in the order of occurrence, and
   the action associated with each pattern that matches the current
   record executed. The action for a matching pattern shall be
   executed before evaluating subsequent patterns. Finally, the
   actions associated with all END patterns shall be executed in the
   order they occur in the program.

Expressions in awk
Expressions describe computations used in patterns and actions.
In the following table, valid expression operations are given in
groups from highest precedence first to lowest precedence last,
with equal-precedence operators grouped between horizontal lines.
In expression evaluation, where the grammar is formally ambiguous,
higher precedence operators shall be evaluated before lower
precedence operators. In this table expr, expr1, expr2, and expr3
represent any expression, while lvalue represents any entity that
can be assigned to (that is, on the left side of an assignment
operator). The precise syntax of expressions is given in Grammar.

         Table 4-1: Expressions in Decreasing Precedence in awk

┌──────────────────────┬─────────────────────────┬────────────────┬──────────────┐
│ Syntax │ Name │ Type of Result │Associativity │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ ( expr ) │Grouping │Type of expr │N/A │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ $expr │Field reference │String │N/A │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ lvalue ++ │Post-increment │Numeric │N/A │
│ lvalue – │Post-decrement │Numeric │N/A │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ ++ lvalue │Pre-increment │Numeric │N/A │
│ – lvalue │Pre-decrement │Numeric │N/A │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ expr ^ expr │Exponentiation │Numeric │Right │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ ! expr │Logical not │Numeric │N/A │
│ + expr │Unary plus │Numeric │N/A │
│ - expr │Unary minus │Numeric │N/A │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ expr * expr │Multiplication │Numeric │Left │
│ expr / expr │Division │Numeric │Left │
│ expr % expr │Modulus │Numeric │Left │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ expr + expr │Addition │Numeric │Left │
│ expr - expr │Subtraction │Numeric │Left │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ expr expr │String concatenation │String │Left │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ expr < expr │Less than │Numeric │None │
│ expr <= expr │Less than or equal to │Numeric │None │
│ expr != expr │Not equal to │Numeric │None │
│ expr == expr │Equal to │Numeric │None │
│ expr > expr │Greater than │Numeric │None │
│ expr >= expr │Greater than or equal to │Numeric │None │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ expr ~ expr │ERE match │Numeric │None │
│ expr !~ expr │ERE non-match │Numeric │None │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ expr in array │Array membership │Numeric │Left │
│ ( index ) in array │Multi-dimension array │Numeric │Left │
│ │membership │ │ │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ expr && expr │Logical AND │Numeric │Left │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ expr || expr │Logical OR │Numeric │Left │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ expr1 ? expr2 : expr3│Conditional expression │Type of selected│Right │
│ │ │expr2 or expr3 │ │
├──────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ lvalue ^= expr │Exponentiation assignment│Numeric │Right │
│ lvalue %= expr │Modulus assignment │Numeric │Right │
│ lvalue *= expr │Multiplication assignment│Numeric │Right │
│ lvalue /= expr │Division assignment │Numeric │Right │
│ lvalue += expr │Addition assignment │Numeric │Right │
│ lvalue -= expr │Subtraction assignment │Numeric │Right │
│ lvalue = expr │Assignment │Type of expr │Right │
└──────────────────────┴─────────────────────────┴────────────────┴──────────────┘

   Each expression shall have either a string value, a numeric value,
   or both. Except as stated for specific contexts, the value of an
   expression shall be implicitly converted to the type needed for
   the context in which it is used. A string value shall be converted
   to a numeric value either by the equivalent of the following calls
   to functions defined by the ISO C standard:

       setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "");
       numeric_value = atof(string_value);

   or by converting the initial portion of the string to type double
   representation as follows:

          The input string is decomposed into two parts: an initial,
          possibly empty, sequence of white-space characters (as
          specified by isspace()) and a subject sequence interpreted
          as a floating-point constant.

          The expected form of the subject sequence is an optional
          '+' or '-' sign, then a non-empty sequence of digits
          optionally containing a <period>, then an optional exponent
          part. An exponent part consists of 'e' or 'E', followed by
          an optional sign, followed by one or more decimal digits.

          The sequence starting with the first digit or the <period>
          (whichever occurs first) is interpreted as a floating
          constant of the C language, and if neither an exponent part
          nor a <period> appears, a <period> is assumed to follow the
          last digit in the string. If the subject sequence begins
          with a <hyphen-minus>, the value resulting from the
          conversion is negated.

   A numeric value that is exactly equal to the value of an integer
   (see Section 1.1.2, Concepts Derived from the ISO C Standard)
   shall be converted to a string by the equivalent of a call to the
   sprintf function (see String Functions) with the string "%d" as
   the fmt argument and the numeric value being converted as the
   first and only expr argument. Any other numeric value shall be
   converted to a string by the equivalent of a call to the sprintf
   function with the value of the variable CONVFMT as the fmt
   argument and the numeric value being converted as the first and
   only expr argument. The result of the conversion is unspecified if
   the value of CONVFMT is not a floating-point format specification.
   This volume of POSIX.1‐2017 specifies no explicit conversions
   between numbers and strings. An application can force an
   expression to be treated as a number by adding zero to it, or can
   force it to be treated as a string by concatenating the null
   string ("") to it.

   A string value shall be considered a numeric string if it comes
   from one of the following:

    1. Field variables

    2. Input from the getline() function

    3. FILENAME

    4. ARGV array elements

    5. ENVIRON array elements

    6. Array elements created by the split() function

    7. A command line variable assignment

    8. Variable assignment from another numeric string variable

   and an implementation-dependent condition corresponding to either
   case (a) or (b) below is met.

    a. After the equivalent of the following calls to functions
       defined by the ISO C standard, string_value_end would differ
       from string_value, and any characters before the terminating
       null character in string_value_end would be <blank>
       characters:

           char *string_value_end;
           setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "");
           numeric_value = strtod (string_value, &string_value_end);

    b. After all the following conversions have been applied, the
       resulting string would lexically be recognized as a NUMBER
       token as described by the lexical conventions in Grammar:

       --  All leading and trailing <blank> characters are discarded.

       --  If the first non-<blank> is '+' or '-', it is discarded.

       --  Each occurrence of the decimal point character from the
           current locale is changed to a <period>.
   In case (a) the numeric value of the numeric string shall be the
   value that would be returned by the strtod() call. In case (b) if
   the first non-<blank> is '-', the numeric value of the numeric
   string shall be the negation of the numeric value of the
   recognized NUMBER token; otherwise, the numeric value of the
   numeric string shall be the numeric value of the recognized NUMBER
   token. Whether or not a string is a numeric string shall be
   relevant only in contexts where that term is used in this section.

   When an expression is used in a Boolean context, if it has a
   numeric value, a value of zero shall be treated as false and any
   other value shall be treated as true. Otherwise, a string value of
   the null string shall be treated as false and any other value
   shall be treated as true.  A Boolean context shall be one of the
   following:

    *  The first subexpression of a conditional expression

    *  An expression operated on by logical NOT, logical AND, or
       logical OR

    *  The second expression of a for statement

    *  The expression of an if statement

    *  The expression of the while clause in either a while or
       do...while statement

    *  An expression used as a pattern (as in Overall Program
       Structure)

   All arithmetic shall follow the semantics of floating-point
   arithmetic as specified by the ISO C standard (see Section 1.1.2,
   Concepts Derived from the ISO C Standard).

   The value of the expression:

       expr1 ^ expr2

   shall be equivalent to the value returned by the ISO C standard
   function call:

       pow(expr1, expr2)

   The expression:

       lvalue ^= expr

   shall be equivalent to the ISO C standard expression:

       lvalue = pow(lvalue, expr)

   except that lvalue shall be evaluated only once. The value of the
   expression:

       expr1 % expr2

   shall be equivalent to the value returned by the ISO C standard
   function call:

       fmod(expr1, expr2)

   The expression:

       lvalue %= expr

   shall be equivalent to the ISO C standard expression:

       lvalue = fmod(lvalue, expr)

   except that lvalue shall be evaluated only once.

   Variables and fields shall be set by the assignment statement:

       lvalue = expression

   and the type of expression shall determine the resulting variable
   type. The assignment includes the arithmetic assignments ("+=",
   "-=", "*=", "/=", "%=", "^=", "++", "--") all of which shall
   produce a numeric result. The left-hand side of an assignment and
   the target of increment and decrement operators can be one of a
   variable, an array with index, or a field selector.

   The awk language supplies arrays that are used for storing numbers
   or strings.  Arrays need not be declared. They shall initially be
   empty, and their sizes shall change dynamically. The subscripts,
   or element identifiers, are strings, providing a type of
   associative array capability. An array name followed by a
   subscript within square brackets can be used as an lvalue and thus
   as an expression, as described in the grammar; see Grammar.
   Unsubscripted array names can be used in only the following
   contexts:

    *  A parameter in a function definition or function call

    *  The NAME token following any use of the keyword in as
       specified in the grammar (see Grammar); if the name used in
       this context is not an array name, the behavior is undefined

   A valid array index shall consist of one or more <comma>-separated
   expressions, similar to the way in which multi-dimensional arrays
   are indexed in some programming languages. Because awk arrays are
   really one-dimensional, such a <comma>-separated list shall be
   converted to a single string by concatenating the string values of
   the separate expressions, each separated from the other by the
   value of the SUBSEP variable. Thus, the following two index
   operations shall be equivalent:

       var[expr1, expr2, ... exprn]

       var[expr1 SUBSEP expr2 SUBSEP ... SUBSEP exprn]

   The application shall ensure that a multi-dimensioned index used
   with the in operator is parenthesized. The in operator, which
   tests for the existence of a particular array element, shall not
   cause that element to exist. Any other reference to a nonexistent
   array element shall automatically create it.

   Comparisons (with the '<', "<=", "!=", "==", '>', and ">="
   operators) shall be made numerically if both operands are numeric,
   if one is numeric and the other has a string value that is a
   numeric string, or if one is numeric and the other has the
   uninitialized value.  Otherwise, operands shall be converted to
   strings as required and a string comparison shall be made as
   follows:

    *  For the "!=" and "==" operators, the strings should be
       compared to check if they are identical but may be compared
       using the locale-specific collation sequence to check if they
       collate equally.

    *  For the other operators, the strings shall be compared using
       the locale-specific collation sequence.

   The value of the comparison expression shall be 1 if the relation
   is true, or 0 if the relation is false.

Variables and Special Variables
Variables can be used in an awk program by referencing them. With
the exception of function parameters (see User-Defined Functions),
they are not explicitly declared. Function parameter names shall
be local to the function; all other variable names shall be
global. The same name shall not be used as both a function
parameter name and as the name of a function or a special awk
variable. The same name shall not be used both as a variable name
with global scope and as the name of a function. The same name
shall not be used within the same scope both as a scalar variable
and as an array. Uninitialized variables, including scalar
variables, array elements, and field variables, shall have an
uninitialized value. An uninitialized value shall have both a
numeric value of zero and a string value of the empty string.
Evaluation of variables with an uninitialized value, to either
string or numeric, shall be determined by the context in which
they are used.

   Field variables shall be designated by a '$' followed by a number
   or numerical expression. The effect of the field number expression
   evaluating to anything other than a non-negative integer is
   unspecified; uninitialized variables or string values need not be
   converted to numeric values in this context. New field variables
   can be created by assigning a value to them. References to
   nonexistent fields (that is, fields after $NF), shall evaluate to
   the uninitialized value. Such references shall not create new
   fields. However, assigning to a nonexistent field (for example,
   $(NF+2)=5) shall increase the value of NF; create any intervening
   fields with the uninitialized value; and cause the value of $0 to
   be recomputed, with the fields being separated by the value of
   OFS.  Each field variable shall have a string value or an
   uninitialized value when created. Field variables shall have the
   uninitialized value when created from $0 using FS and the variable
   does not contain any characters. If appropriate, the field
   variable shall be considered a numeric string (see Expressions in
   awk).

   Implementations shall support the following other special
   variables that are set by awk:

   ARGC      The number of elements in the ARGV array.

   ARGV      An array of command line arguments, excluding options
             and the program argument, numbered from zero to ARGC-1.

             The arguments in ARGV can be modified or added to; ARGC
             can be altered. As each input file ends, awk shall treat
             the next non-null element of ARGV, up to the current
             value of ARGC-1, inclusive, as the name of the next
             input file. Thus, setting an element of ARGV to null
             means that it shall not be treated as an input file. The
             name '-' indicates the standard input. If an argument
             matches the format of an assignment operand, this
             argument shall be treated as an assignment rather than a
             file argument.

   CONVFMT   The printf format for converting numbers to strings
             (except for output statements, where OFMT is used);
             "%.6g" by default.

   ENVIRON   An array representing the value of the environment, as
             described in the exec functions defined in the System
             Interfaces volume of POSIX.1‐2017. The indices of the
             array shall be strings consisting of the names of the
             environment variables, and the value of each array
             element shall be a string consisting of the value of
             that variable. If appropriate, the environment variable
             shall be considered a numeric string (see Expressions in
             awk); the array element shall also have its numeric
             value.

             In all cases where the behavior of awk is affected by
             environment variables (including the environment of any
             commands that awk executes via the system function or
             via pipeline redirections with the print statement, the
             printf statement, or the getline function), the
             environment used shall be the environment at the time
             awk began executing; it is implementation-defined
             whether any modification of ENVIRON affects this
             environment.

   FILENAME  A pathname of the current input file. Inside a BEGIN
             action the value is undefined. Inside an END action the
             value shall be the name of the last input file
             processed.

   FNR       The ordinal number of the current record in the current
             file. Inside a BEGIN action the value shall be zero.
             Inside an END action the value shall be the number of
             the last record processed in the last file processed.

   FS        Input field separator regular expression; a <space> by
             default.

   NF        The number of fields in the current record. Inside a
             BEGIN action, the use of NF is undefined unless a
             getline function without a var argument is executed
             previously. Inside an END action, NF shall retain the
             value it had for the last record read, unless a
             subsequent, redirected, getline function without a var
             argument is performed prior to entering the END action.

   NR        The ordinal number of the current record from the start
             of input.  Inside a BEGIN action the value shall be
             zero. Inside an END action the value shall be the number
             of the last record processed.

   OFMT      The printf format for converting numbers to strings in
             output statements (see Output Statements); "%.6g" by
             default. The result of the conversion is unspecified if
             the value of OFMT is not a floating-point format
             specification.

   OFS       The print statement output field separator; <space> by
             default.

   ORS       The print statement output record separator; a <newline>
             by default.

   RLENGTH   The length of the string matched by the match function.

   RS        The first character of the string value of RS shall be
             the input record separator; a <newline> by default. If
             RS contains more than one character, the results are
             unspecified. If RS is null, then records are separated
             by sequences consisting of a <newline> plus one or more
             blank lines, leading or trailing blank lines shall not
             result in empty records at the beginning or end of the
             input, and a <newline> shall always be a field
             separator, no matter what the value of FS is.

   RSTART    The starting position of the string matched by the match
             function, numbering from 1. This shall always be
             equivalent to the return value of the match function.

   SUBSEP    The subscript separator string for multi-dimensional
             arrays; the default value is implementation-defined.

Regular Expressions
The awk utility shall make use of the extended regular expression
notation (see the Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Section
9.4, Extended Regular Expressions) except that it shall allow the
use of C-language conventions for escaping special characters
within the EREs, as specified in the table in the Base Definitions
volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter 5, File Format Notation (‘\‘,
‘\a’, ‘\b’, ‘\f’, ‘\n’, ‘\r’, ‘\t’, ‘\v’) and the following table;
these escape sequences shall be recognized both inside and outside
bracket expressions. Note that records need not be separated by
characters and string constants can contain
characters, so even the “\n” sequence is valid in awk EREs. Using
a character within an ERE requires the escaping shown in
the following table.

                   Table 4-2: Escape Sequences in awk

┌──────────┬────────────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Escape │ │ │
│ Sequence │ Description │ Meaning │
├──────────┼────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────┤
│ " │ character │
├──────────┼────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────┤
│ / │ character │
├──────────┼────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────┤
│ \ddd │ A character followed │ The character whose encoding is │
│ │ by the longest sequence of one, │ represented by the one, two, or │
│ │ two, or three octal-digit │ three-digit octal integer. Multi- │
│ │ characters (01234567). If all of │ byte characters require multiple, │
│ │ the digits are 0 (that is, │ concatenated escape sequences of │
│ │ representation of the NUL │ this type, including the leading │
│ │ character), the behavior is │ for each byte. │
│ │ undefined. │ │
├──────────┼────────────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────────────┤
│ \c │ A character followed │ Undefined │
│ │ by any character not described in │ │
│ │ this table or in the table in the │ │
│ │ Base Definitions volume of │ │
│ │ POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter 5, File │ │
│ │ Format Notation (‘\‘, ‘\a’, ‘\b’, │ │
│ │ ‘\f’, ‘\n’, ‘\r’, ‘\t’, ‘\v’). │ │
└──────────┴────────────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────────┘

   A  regular  expression  can be matched against a specific field or
   string by  using  one  of  the  two  regular  expression  matching
   operators,  '~'  and  "!~".  These operators shall interpret their
   right-hand operand as a regular  expression  and  their  left-hand
   operand as a string. If the regular expression matches the string,
   the  '~'  expression  shall evaluate to a value of 1, and the "!~"
   expression shall evaluate to a value of 0. (The regular expression
   matching operation is as defined by the term matched in  the  Base
   Definitions   volume   of   POSIX.1‐2017,   Section  9.1,  Regular
   Expression Definitions, where a match occurs on any  part  of  the
   string   unless   the  regular  expression  is  limited  with  the
   <circumflex> or <dollar-sign> special characters.) If the  regular
   expression  does  not  match  the string, the '~' expression shall
   evaluate to a value of 0, and the "!~" expression  shall  evaluate
   to a value of 1. If the right-hand operand is any expression other
   than  the  lexical  token  ERE, the string value of the expression
   shall be interpreted as an extended regular expression,  including
   the  escape  conventions  described  above.   Note that these same
   escape conventions shall also be applied in determining the  value
   of  a string literal (the lexical token STRING), and thus shall be
   applied a second time when  a  string  literal  is  used  in  this
   context.

   When  an  ERE  token appears as an expression in any context other
   than as the right-hand of the '~' or "!~" operator or  as  one  of
   the  built-in function arguments described below, the value of the
   resulting expression shall be the equivalent of:

       $0 ~ /ere/

   The ere argument to the gsub, match, sub  functions,  and  the  fs
   argument  to  the  split  function (see String Functions) shall be
   interpreted as extended regular expressions. These can  be  either
   ERE  tokens  or arbitrary expressions, and shall be interpreted in
   the same manner  as  the  right-hand  side  of  the  '~'  or  "!~"
   operator.

   An  extended  regular expression can be used to separate fields by
   assigning a string  containing  the  expression  to  the  built-in
   variable  FS,  either directly or as a consequence of using the -F
   sepstring option.  The default value of the FS variable shall be a
   single <space>.  The following describes FS behavior:

    1. If FS is a null string, the behavior is unspecified.

    2. If FS is a single character:

        a. If FS is <space>, skip leading and trailing <blank> and
           <newline> characters; fields shall be delimited by sets of
           one or more <blank> or <newline> characters.

        b. Otherwise, if FS is any other character c, fields shall be
           delimited by each single occurrence of c.

    3. Otherwise, the string value of FS shall be considered to be an
       extended regular expression. Each occurrence of a sequence
       matching the extended regular expression shall delimit fields.

   Except for the '~' and "!~" operators, and in the gsub, match,
   split, and sub built-in functions, ERE matching shall be based on
   input records; that is, record separator characters (the first
   character of the value of the variable RS, <newline> by default)
   cannot be embedded in the expression, and no expression shall
   match the record separator character. If the record separator is
   not <newline>, <newline> characters embedded in the expression can
   be matched. For the '~' and "!~" operators, and in those four
   built-in functions, ERE matching shall be based on text strings;
   that is, any character (including <newline> and the record
   separator) can be embedded in the pattern, and an appropriate
   pattern shall match any character. However, in all awk ERE
   matching, the use of one or more NUL characters in the pattern,
   input record, or text string produces undefined results.

Patterns
A pattern is any valid expression, a range specified by two
expressions separated by a comma, or one of the two special
patterns BEGIN or END.

Special Patterns
The awk utility shall recognize two special patterns, BEGIN and
END. Each BEGIN pattern shall be matched once and its associated
action executed before the first record of input is read—except
possibly by use of the getline function (see Input/Output and
General Functions) in a prior BEGIN action—and before command line
assignment is done. Each END pattern shall be matched once and its
associated action executed after the last record of input has been
read. These two patterns shall have associated actions.

   BEGIN and END shall not combine with other patterns. Multiple
   BEGIN and END patterns shall be allowed. The actions associated
   with the BEGIN patterns shall be executed in the order specified
   in the program, as are the END actions. An END pattern can precede
   a BEGIN pattern in a program.

   If an awk program consists of only actions with the pattern BEGIN,
   and the BEGIN action contains no getline function, awk shall exit
   without reading its input when the last statement in the last
   BEGIN action is executed. If an awk program consists of only
   actions with the pattern END or only actions with the patterns
   BEGIN and END, the input shall be read before the statements in
   the END actions are executed.

Expression Patterns
An expression pattern shall be evaluated as if it were an
expression in a Boolean context. If the result is true, the
pattern shall be considered to match, and the associated action
(if any) shall be executed. If the result is false, the action
shall not be executed.

Pattern Ranges
A pattern range consists of two expressions separated by a comma;
in this case, the action shall be performed for all records
between a match of the first expression and the following match of
the second expression, inclusive. At this point, the pattern range
can be repeated starting at input records subsequent to the end of
the matched range.

Actions
An action is a sequence of statements as shown in the grammar in
Grammar. Any single statement can be replaced by a statement list
enclosed in curly braces. The application shall ensure that
statements in a statement list are separated by or
characters. Statements in a statement list shall be
executed sequentially in the order that they appear.

   The expression acting as the conditional in an if statement shall
   be evaluated and if it is non-zero or non-null, the following
   statement shall be executed; otherwise, if else is present, the
   statement following the else shall be executed.

   The if, while, do...while, for, break, and continue statements are
   based on the ISO C standard (see Section 1.1.2, Concepts Derived
   from the ISO C Standard), except that the Boolean expressions
   shall be treated as described in Expressions in awk, and except in
   the case of:

       for (variable in array)

   which shall iterate, assigning each index of array to variable in
   an unspecified order. The results of adding new elements to array
   within such a for loop are undefined. If a break or continue
   statement occurs outside of a loop, the behavior is undefined.

   The delete statement shall remove an individual array element.
   Thus, the following code deletes an entire array:

       for (index in array)
           delete array[index]

   The next statement shall cause all further processing of the
   current input record to be abandoned. The behavior is undefined if
   a next statement appears or is invoked in a BEGIN or END action.

   The exit statement shall invoke all END actions in the order in
   which they occur in the program source and then terminate the
   program without reading further input. An exit statement inside an
   END action shall terminate the program without further execution
   of END actions. If an expression is specified in an exit
   statement, its numeric value shall be the exit status of awk,
   unless subsequent errors are encountered or a subsequent exit
   statement with an expression is executed.

Output Statements
Both print and printf statements shall write to standard output by
default. The output shall be written to the location specified by
output_redirection if one is supplied, as follows:

       > expression
       >> expression
       | expression

   In all cases, the expression shall be evaluated to produce a
   string that is used as a pathname into which to write (for '>' or
   ">>") or as a command to be executed (for '|').  Using the first
   two forms, if the file of that name is not currently open, it
   shall be opened, creating it if necessary and using the first
   form, truncating the file. The output then shall be appended to
   the file. As long as the file remains open, subsequent calls in
   which expression evaluates to the same string value shall simply
   append output to the file. The file remains open until the close
   function (see Input/Output and General Functions) is called with
   an expression that evaluates to the same string value.

   The third form shall write output onto a stream piped to the input
   of a command. The stream shall be created if no stream is
   currently open with the value of expression as its command name.
   The stream created shall be equivalent to one created by a call to
   the popen() function defined in the System Interfaces volume of
   POSIX.1‐2017 with the value of expression as the command argument
   and a value of w as the mode argument. As long as the stream
   remains open, subsequent calls in which expression evaluates to
   the same string value shall write output to the existing stream.
   The stream shall remain open until the close function (see
   Input/Output and General Functions) is called with an expression
   that evaluates to the same string value.  At that time, the stream
   shall be closed as if by a call to the pclose() function defined
   in the System Interfaces volume of POSIX.1‐2017.

   As described in detail by the grammar in Grammar, these output
   statements shall take a <comma>-separated list of expressions
   referred to in the grammar by the non-terminal symbols expr_list,
   print_expr_list, or print_expr_list_opt.  This list is referred to
   here as the expression list, and each member is referred to as an
   expression argument.

   The print statement shall write the value of each expression
   argument onto the indicated output stream separated by the current
   output field separator (see variable OFS above), and terminated by
   the output record separator (see variable ORS above). All
   expression arguments shall be taken as strings, being converted if
   necessary; this conversion shall be as described in Expressions in
   awk, with the exception that the printf format in OFMT shall be
   used instead of the value in CONVFMT.  An empty expression list
   shall stand for the whole input record ($0).

   The printf statement shall produce output based on a notation
   similar to the File Format Notation used to describe file formats
   in this volume of POSIX.1‐2017 (see the Base Definitions volume of
   POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter 5, File Format Notation).  Output shall be
   produced as specified with the first expression argument as the
   string format and subsequent expression arguments as the strings
   arg1 to argn, inclusive, with the following exceptions:

    1. The format shall be an actual character string rather than a
       graphical representation. Therefore, it cannot contain empty
       character positions. The <space> in the format string, in any
       context other than a flag of a conversion specification, shall
       be treated as an ordinary character that is copied to the
       output.

    2. If the character set contains a '' character and that
       character appears in the format string, it shall be treated as
       an ordinary character that is copied to the output.

    3. The escape sequences beginning with a <backslash> character
       shall be treated as sequences of ordinary characters that are
       copied to the output. Note that these same sequences shall be
       interpreted lexically by awk when they appear in literal
       strings, but they shall not be treated specially by the printf
       statement.

    4. A field width or precision can be specified as the '*'
       character instead of a digit string. In this case the next
       argument from the expression list shall be fetched and its
       numeric value taken as the field width or precision.

    5. The implementation shall not precede or follow output from the
       d or u conversion specifier characters with <blank> characters
       not specified by the format string.

    6. The implementation shall not precede output from the o
       conversion specifier character with leading zeros not
       specified by the format string.

    7. For the c conversion specifier character: if the argument has
       a numeric value, the character whose encoding is that value
       shall be output. If the value is zero or is not the encoding
       of any character in the character set, the behavior is
       undefined. If the argument does not have a numeric value, the
       first character of the string value shall be output; if the
       string does not contain any characters, the behavior is
       undefined.

    8. For each conversion specification that consumes an argument,
       the next expression argument shall be evaluated. With the
       exception of the c conversion specifier character, the value
       shall be converted (according to the rules specified in
       Expressions in awk) to the appropriate type for the conversion
       specification.

    9. If there are insufficient expression arguments to satisfy all
       the conversion specifications in the format string, the
       behavior is undefined.

   10. If any character sequence in the format string begins with a
       '%' character, but does not form a valid conversion
       specification, the behavior is unspecified.

   Both print and printf can output at least {LINE_MAX} bytes.

Functions
The awk language has a variety of built-in functions: arithmetic,
string, input/output, and general.

Arithmetic Functions
The arithmetic functions, except for int, shall be based on the
ISO C standard (see Section 1.1.2, Concepts Derived from the ISO C
Standard). The behavior is undefined in cases where the ISO C
standard specifies that an error be returned or that the behavior
is undefined. Although the grammar (see Grammar) permits built-in
functions to appear with no arguments or parentheses, unless the
argument or parentheses are indicated as optional in the following
list (by displaying them within the “[]” brackets), such use is
undefined.

   atan2(y,x)
             Return arctangent of y/x in radians in the range [-π,π].

   cos(x)    Return cosine of x, where x is in radians.

   sin(x)    Return sine of x, where x is in radians.

   exp(x)    Return the exponential function of x.

   log(x)    Return the natural logarithm of x.

   sqrt(x)   Return the square root of x.

   int(x)    Return the argument truncated to an integer. Truncation
             shall be toward 0 when x>0.

   rand()    Return a random number n, such that 0≤n<1.

   srand([expr])
             Set the seed value for rand to expr or use the time of
             day if expr is omitted. The previous seed value shall be
             returned.

String Functions
The string functions in the following list shall be supported.
Although the grammar (see Grammar) permits built-in functions to
appear with no arguments or parentheses, unless the argument or
parentheses are indicated as optional in the following list (by
displaying them within the “[]” brackets), such use is undefined.

   gsub(ere, repl[, in])
             Behave like sub (see below), except that it shall
             replace all occurrences of the regular expression (like
             the ed utility global substitute) in $0 or in the in
             argument, when specified.

   index(s, t)
             Return the position, in characters, numbering from 1, in
             string s where string t first occurs, or zero if it does
             not occur at all.

   length[([s])]
             Return the length, in characters, of its argument taken
             as a string, or of the whole record, $0, if there is no
             argument.

   match(s, ere)
             Return the position, in characters, numbering from 1, in
             string s where the extended regular expression ere
             occurs, or zero if it does not occur at all. RSTART
             shall be set to the starting position (which is the same
             as the returned value), zero if no match is found;
             RLENGTH shall be set to the length of the matched
             string, -1 if no match is found.

   split(s, a[, fs ])
             Split the string s into array elements a[1], a[2], ...,
             a[n], and return n.  All elements of the array shall be
             deleted before the split is performed. The separation
             shall be done with the ERE fs or with the field
             separator FS if fs is not given. Each array element
             shall have a string value when created and, if
             appropriate, the array element shall be considered a
             numeric string (see Expressions in awk).  The effect of
             a null string as the value of fs is unspecified.

   sprintf(fmt, expr, expr, ...)
             Format the expressions according to the printf format
             given by fmt and return the resulting string.

   sub(ere, repl[, in ])
             Substitute the string repl in place of the first
             instance of the extended regular expression ERE in
             string in and return the number of substitutions. An
             <ampersand> ('&') appearing in the string repl shall be
             replaced by the string from in that matches the ERE. An
             <ampersand> preceded with a <backslash> shall be
             interpreted as the literal <ampersand> character. An
             occurrence of two consecutive <backslash> characters
             shall be interpreted as just a single literal
             <backslash> character. Any other occurrence of a
             <backslash> (for example, preceding any other character)
             shall be treated as a literal <backslash> character.
             Note that if repl is a string literal (the lexical token
             STRING; see Grammar), the handling of the <ampersand>
             character occurs after any lexical processing, including
             any lexical <backslash>-escape sequence processing. If
             in is specified and it is not an lvalue (see Expressions
             in awk), the behavior is undefined. If in is omitted,
             awk shall use the current record ($0) in its place.

   substr(s, m[, n ])
             Return the at most n-character substring of s that
             begins at position m, numbering from 1. If n is omitted,
             or if n specifies more characters than are left in the
             string, the length of the substring shall be limited by
             the length of the string s.

   tolower(s)
             Return a string based on the string s.  Each character
             in s that is an uppercase letter specified to have a
             tolower mapping by the LC_CTYPE category of the current
             locale shall be replaced in the returned string by the
             lowercase letter specified by the mapping. Other
             characters in s shall be unchanged in the returned
             string.

   toupper(s)
             Return a string based on the string s.  Each character
             in s that is a lowercase letter specified to have a
             toupper mapping by the LC_CTYPE category of the current
             locale is replaced in the returned string by the
             uppercase letter specified by the mapping. Other
             characters in s are unchanged in the returned string.

   All of the preceding functions that take ERE as a parameter expect
   a pattern or a string valued expression that is a regular
   expression as defined in Regular Expressions.

Input/Output and General Functions
The input/output and general functions are:

   close(expression)
             Close the file or pipe opened by a print or printf
             statement or a call to getline with the same string-
             valued expression.  The limit on the number of open
             expression arguments is implementation-defined. If the
             close was successful, the function shall return zero;
             otherwise, it shall return non-zero.

   expression | getline [var]
             Read a record of input from a stream piped from the
             output of a command. The stream shall be created if no
             stream is currently open with the value of expression as
             its command name. The stream created shall be equivalent
             to one created by a call to the popen() function with
             the value of expression as the command argument and a
             value of r as the mode argument. As long as the stream
             remains open, subsequent calls in which expression
             evaluates to the same string value shall read subsequent
             records from the stream. The stream shall remain open
             until the close function is called with an expression
             that evaluates to the same string value. At that time,
             the stream shall be closed as if by a call to the
             pclose() function. If var is omitted, $0 and NF shall be
             set; otherwise, var shall be set and, if appropriate, it
             shall be considered a numeric string (see Expressions in
             awk).

             The getline operator can form ambiguous constructs when
             there are unparenthesized operators (including
             concatenate) to the left of the '|' (to the beginning of
             the expression containing getline).  In the context of
             the '$' operator, '|' shall behave as if it had a lower
             precedence than '$'.  The result of evaluating other
             operators is unspecified, and conforming applications
             shall parenthesize properly all such usages.

   getline   Set $0 to the next input record from the current input
             file. This form of getline shall set the NF, NR, and FNR
             variables.

   getline var
             Set variable var to the next input record from the
             current input file and, if appropriate, var shall be
             considered a numeric string (see Expressions in awk).
             This form of getline shall set the FNR and NR variables.

   getline [var] < expression
             Read the next record of input from a named file. The
             expression shall be evaluated to produce a string that
             is used as a pathname.  If the file of that name is not
             currently open, it shall be opened. As long as the
             stream remains open, subsequent calls in which
             expression evaluates to the same string value shall read
             subsequent records from the file. The file shall remain
             open until the close function is called with an
             expression that evaluates to the same string value. If
             var is omitted, $0 and NF shall be set; otherwise, var
             shall be set and, if appropriate, it shall be considered
             a numeric string (see Expressions in awk).

             The getline operator can form ambiguous constructs when
             there are unparenthesized binary operators (including
             concatenate) to the right of the '<' (up to the end of
             the expression containing the getline).  The result of
             evaluating such a construct is unspecified, and
             conforming applications shall parenthesize properly all
             such usages.

   system(expression)
             Execute the command given by expression in a manner
             equivalent to the system() function defined in the
             System Interfaces volume of POSIX.1‐2017 and return the
             exit status of the command.

   All forms of getline shall return 1 for successful input, zero for
   end-of-file, and -1 for an error.

   Where strings are used as the name of a file or pipeline, the
   application shall ensure that the strings are textually identical.
   The terminology ``same string value'' implies that ``equivalent
   strings'', even those that differ only by <space> characters,
   represent different files.

User-Defined Functions
The awk language also provides user-defined functions. Such
functions can be defined as:

       function name([parameter, ...]) { statements }

   A function can be referred to anywhere in an awk program; in
   particular, its use can precede its definition. The scope of a
   function is global.

   Function parameters, if present, can be either scalars or arrays;
   the behavior is undefined if an array name is passed as a
   parameter that the function uses as a scalar, or if a scalar
   expression is passed as a parameter that the function uses as an
   array. Function parameters shall be passed by value if scalar and
   by reference if array name.

   The number of parameters in the function definition need not match
   the number of parameters in the function call. Excess formal
   parameters can be used as local variables. If fewer arguments are
   supplied in a function call than are in the function definition,
   the extra parameters that are used in the function body as scalars
   shall evaluate to the uninitialized value until they are otherwise
   initialized, and the extra parameters that are used in the
   function body as arrays shall be treated as uninitialized arrays
   where each element evaluates to the uninitialized value until
   otherwise initialized.

   When invoking a function, no white space can be placed between the
   function name and the opening parenthesis. Function calls can be
   nested and recursive calls can be made upon functions. Upon return
   from any nested or recursive function call, the values of all of
   the calling function's parameters shall be unchanged, except for
   array parameters passed by reference. The return statement can be
   used to return a value. If a return statement appears outside of a
   function definition, the behavior is undefined.

   In the function definition, <newline> characters shall be optional
   before the opening brace and after the closing brace. Function
   definitions can appear anywhere in the program where a pattern-
   action pair is allowed.

Grammar
The grammar in this section and the lexical conventions in the
following section shall together describe the syntax for awk
programs. The general conventions for this style of grammar are
described in Section 1.3, Grammar Conventions. A valid program
can be represented as the non-terminal symbol program in the
grammar. This formal syntax shall take precedence over the
preceding text syntax description.

       %token NAME NUMBER STRING ERE
       %token FUNC_NAME   /* Name followed by '(' without white space. */

       /* Keywords */
       %token       Begin   End
       /*          'BEGIN' 'END'                            */

       %token       Break   Continue   Delete   Do   Else
       /*          'break' 'continue' 'delete' 'do' 'else'  */

       %token       Exit   For   Function   If   In
       /*          'exit' 'for' 'function' 'if' 'in'        */

       %token       Next   Print   Printf   Return   While
       /*          'next' 'print' 'printf' 'return' 'while' */

       /* Reserved function names */
       %token BUILTIN_FUNC_NAME
                   /* One token for the following:
                    * atan2 cos sin exp log sqrt int rand srand
                    * gsub index length match split sprintf sub
                    * substr tolower toupper close system
                    */
       %token GETLINE
                   /* Syntactically different from other built-ins. */

       /* Two-character tokens. */
       %token ADD_ASSIGN SUB_ASSIGN MUL_ASSIGN DIV_ASSIGN MOD_ASSIGN POW_ASSIGN
       /*     '+='       '-='       '*='       '/='       '%='       '^=' */

       %token OR   AND  NO_MATCH   EQ   LE   GE   NE   INCR  DECR  APPEND
       /*     '||' '&&' '!~' '==' '<=' '>=' '!=' '++'  '--'  '>>'   */

       /* One-character tokens. */
       %token '{' '}' '(' ')' '[' ']' ',' ';' NEWLINE
       %token '+' '-' '*' '%' '^' '!' '>' '<' '|' '?' ':' '~' '$' '='

       %start program
       %%

       program          : item_list
                        | item_list item
                        ;

       item_list        : /* empty */
                        | item_list item terminator
                        ;

       item             : action
                        | pattern action
                        | normal_pattern
                        | Function NAME      '(' param_list_opt ')'
                              newline_opt action
                        | Function FUNC_NAME '(' param_list_opt ')'
                              newline_opt action
                        ;

       param_list_opt   : /* empty */
                        | param_list
                        ;

       param_list       : NAME
                        | param_list ',' NAME
                        ;

       pattern          : normal_pattern
                        | special_pattern
                        ;

       normal_pattern   : expr
                        | expr ',' newline_opt expr
                        ;

       special_pattern  : Begin
                        | End
                        ;

       action           : '{' newline_opt                             '}'
                        | '{' newline_opt terminated_statement_list   '}'
                        | '{' newline_opt unterminated_statement_list '}'
                        ;

       terminator       : terminator NEWLINE
                        |            ';'
                        |            NEWLINE
                        ;

       terminated_statement_list : terminated_statement
                        | terminated_statement_list terminated_statement
                        ;

       unterminated_statement_list : unterminated_statement
                        | terminated_statement_list unterminated_statement
                        ;

       terminated_statement : action newline_opt
                        | If '(' expr ')' newline_opt terminated_statement
                        | If '(' expr ')' newline_opt terminated_statement
                              Else newline_opt terminated_statement
                        | While '(' expr ')' newline_opt terminated_statement
                        | For '(' simple_statement_opt ';'
                             expr_opt ';' simple_statement_opt ')' newline_opt
                             terminated_statement
                        | For '(' NAME In NAME ')' newline_opt
                             terminated_statement
                        | ';' newline_opt
                        | terminatable_statement NEWLINE newline_opt
                        | terminatable_statement ';'     newline_opt
                        ;

       unterminated_statement : terminatable_statement
                        | If '(' expr ')' newline_opt unterminated_statement
                        | If '(' expr ')' newline_opt terminated_statement
                             Else newline_opt unterminated_statement
                        | While '(' expr ')' newline_opt unterminated_statement
                        | For '(' simple_statement_opt ';'
                         expr_opt ';' simple_statement_opt ')' newline_opt
                             unterminated_statement
                        | For '(' NAME In NAME ')' newline_opt
                             unterminated_statement
                        ;

       terminatable_statement : simple_statement
                        | Break
                        | Continue
                        | Next
                        | Exit expr_opt
                        | Return expr_opt
                        | Do newline_opt terminated_statement While '(' expr ')'
                        ;

       simple_statement_opt : /* empty */
                        | simple_statement
                        ;

       simple_statement : Delete NAME '[' expr_list ']'
                        | expr
                        | print_statement
                        ;

       print_statement  : simple_print_statement
                        | simple_print_statement output_redirection
                        ;

       simple_print_statement : Print  print_expr_list_opt
                        | Print  '(' multiple_expr_list ')'
                        | Printf print_expr_list
                        | Printf '(' multiple_expr_list ')'
                        ;

       output_redirection : '>'    expr
                        | APPEND expr
                        | '|'    expr
                        ;

       expr_list_opt    : /* empty */
                        | expr_list
                        ;

       expr_list        : expr
                        | multiple_expr_list
                        ;

       multiple_expr_list : expr ',' newline_opt expr
                        | multiple_expr_list ',' newline_opt expr
                        ;

       expr_opt         : /* empty */
                        | expr
                        ;

       expr             : unary_expr
                        | non_unary_expr
                        ;

       unary_expr       : '+' expr
                        | '-' expr
                        | unary_expr '^'      expr
                        | unary_expr '*'      expr
                        | unary_expr '/'      expr
                        | unary_expr '%'      expr
                        | unary_expr '+'      expr
                        | unary_expr '-'      expr
                        | unary_expr          non_unary_expr
                        | unary_expr '<'      expr
                        | unary_expr LE       expr
                        | unary_expr NE       expr
                        | unary_expr EQ       expr
                        | unary_expr '>'      expr
                        | unary_expr GE       expr
                        | unary_expr '~'      expr
                        | unary_expr NO_MATCH expr
                        | unary_expr In NAME
                        | unary_expr AND newline_opt expr
                        | unary_expr OR  newline_opt expr
                        | unary_expr '?' expr ':' expr
                        | unary_input_function
                        ;

       non_unary_expr   : '(' expr ')'
                        | '!' expr
                        | non_unary_expr '^'      expr
                        | non_unary_expr '*'      expr
                        | non_unary_expr '/'      expr
                        | non_unary_expr '%'      expr
                        | non_unary_expr '+'      expr
                        | non_unary_expr '-'      expr
                        | non_unary_expr          non_unary_expr
                        | non_unary_expr '<'      expr
                        | non_unary_expr LE       expr
                        | non_unary_expr NE       expr
                        | non_unary_expr EQ       expr
                        | non_unary_expr '>'      expr
                        | non_unary_expr GE       expr
                        | non_unary_expr '~'      expr
                        | non_unary_expr NO_MATCH expr
                        | non_unary_expr In NAME
                        | '(' multiple_expr_list ')' In NAME
                        | non_unary_expr AND newline_opt expr
                        | non_unary_expr OR  newline_opt expr
                        | non_unary_expr '?' expr ':' expr
                        | NUMBER
                        | STRING
                        | lvalue
                        | ERE
                        | lvalue INCR
                        | lvalue DECR
                        | INCR lvalue
                        | DECR lvalue
                        | lvalue POW_ASSIGN expr
                        | lvalue MOD_ASSIGN expr
                        | lvalue MUL_ASSIGN expr
                        | lvalue DIV_ASSIGN expr
                        | lvalue ADD_ASSIGN expr
                        | lvalue SUB_ASSIGN expr
                        | lvalue '=' expr
                        | FUNC_NAME '(' expr_list_opt ')'
                             /* no white space allowed before '(' */
                        | BUILTIN_FUNC_NAME '(' expr_list_opt ')'
                        | BUILTIN_FUNC_NAME
                        | non_unary_input_function
                        ;

       print_expr_list_opt : /* empty */
                        | print_expr_list
                        ;

       print_expr_list  : print_expr
                        | print_expr_list ',' newline_opt print_expr
                        ;

       print_expr       : unary_print_expr
                        | non_unary_print_expr
                        ;

       unary_print_expr : '+' print_expr
                        | '-' print_expr
                        | unary_print_expr '^'      print_expr
                        | unary_print_expr '*'      print_expr
                        | unary_print_expr '/'      print_expr
                        | unary_print_expr '%'      print_expr
                        | unary_print_expr '+'      print_expr
                        | unary_print_expr '-'      print_expr
                        | unary_print_expr          non_unary_print_expr
                        | unary_print_expr '~'      print_expr
                        | unary_print_expr NO_MATCH print_expr
                        | unary_print_expr In NAME
                        | unary_print_expr AND newline_opt print_expr
                        | unary_print_expr OR  newline_opt print_expr
                        | unary_print_expr '?' print_expr ':' print_expr
                        ;

       non_unary_print_expr : '(' expr ')'
                        | '!' print_expr
                        | non_unary_print_expr '^'      print_expr
                        | non_unary_print_expr '*'      print_expr
                        | non_unary_print_expr '/'      print_expr
                        | non_unary_print_expr '%'      print_expr
                        | non_unary_print_expr '+'      print_expr
                        | non_unary_print_expr '-'      print_expr
                        | non_unary_print_expr          non_unary_print_expr
                        | non_unary_print_expr '~'      print_expr
                        | non_unary_print_expr NO_MATCH print_expr
                        | non_unary_print_expr In NAME
                        | '(' multiple_expr_list ')' In NAME
                        | non_unary_print_expr AND newline_opt print_expr
                        | non_unary_print_expr OR  newline_opt print_expr
                        | non_unary_print_expr '?' print_expr ':' print_expr
                        | NUMBER
                        | STRING
                        | lvalue
                        | ERE
                        | lvalue INCR
                        | lvalue DECR
                        | INCR lvalue
                        | DECR lvalue
                        | lvalue POW_ASSIGN print_expr
                        | lvalue MOD_ASSIGN print_expr
                        | lvalue MUL_ASSIGN print_expr
                        | lvalue DIV_ASSIGN print_expr
                        | lvalue ADD_ASSIGN print_expr
                        | lvalue SUB_ASSIGN print_expr
                        | lvalue '=' print_expr
                        | FUNC_NAME '(' expr_list_opt ')'
                            /* no white space allowed before '(' */
                        | BUILTIN_FUNC_NAME '(' expr_list_opt ')'
                        | BUILTIN_FUNC_NAME
                        ;

       lvalue           : NAME
                        | NAME '[' expr_list ']'
                        | '$' expr
                        ;

       non_unary_input_function : simple_get
                        | simple_get '<' expr
                        | non_unary_expr '|' simple_get
                        ;

       unary_input_function : unary_expr '|' simple_get
                        ;

       simple_get       : GETLINE
                        | GETLINE lvalue
                        ;

       newline_opt      : /* empty */
                        | newline_opt NEWLINE
                        ;

   This grammar has several ambiguities that shall be resolved as
   follows:

    *  Operator precedence and associativity shall be as described in
       Table 4-1, Expressions in Decreasing Precedence in awk.

    *  In case of ambiguity, an else shall be associated with the
       most immediately preceding if that would satisfy the grammar.

    *  In some contexts, a <slash> ('/') that is used to surround an
       ERE could also be the division operator.  This shall be
       resolved in such a way that wherever the division operator
       could appear, a <slash> is assumed to be the division
       operator. (There is no unary division operator.)

   Each expression in an awk program shall conform to the precedence
   and associativity rules, even when this is not needed to resolve
   an ambiguity. For example, because '$' has higher precedence than
   '++', the string "$x++--" is not a valid awk expression, even
   though it is unambiguously parsed by the grammar as "$(x++)--".

   One convention that might not be obvious from the formal grammar
   is where <newline> characters are acceptable. There are several
   obvious placements such as terminating a statement, and a
   <backslash> can be used to escape <newline> characters between any
   lexical tokens. In addition, <newline> characters without
   <backslash> characters can follow a comma, an open brace, logical
   AND operator ("&&"), logical OR operator ("||"), the do keyword,
   the else keyword, and the closing parenthesis of an if, for, or
   while statement. For example:

       { print  $1,
                $2 }

Lexical Conventions
The lexical conventions for awk programs, with respect to the
preceding grammar, shall be as follows:

    1. Except as noted, awk shall recognize the longest possible
       token or delimiter beginning at a given point.

    2. A comment shall consist of any characters beginning with the
       <number-sign> character and terminated by, but excluding the
       next occurrence of, a <newline>.  Comments shall have no
       effect, except to delimit lexical tokens.

    3. The <newline> shall be recognized as the token NEWLINE.

    4. A <backslash> character immediately followed by a <newline>
       shall have no effect.

    5. The token STRING shall represent a string constant. A string
       constant shall begin with the character '"'.  Within a string
       constant, a <backslash> character shall be considered to begin
       an escape sequence as specified in the table in the Base
       Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter 5, File Format
       Notation ('\\', '\a', '\b', '\f', '\n', '\r', '\t', '\v').  In
       addition, the escape sequences in Table 4-2, Escape Sequences
       in awk shall be recognized. A <newline> shall not occur within
       a string constant. A string constant shall be terminated by
       the first unescaped occurrence of the character '"' after the
       one that begins the string constant. The value of the string
       shall be the sequence of all unescaped characters and values
       of escape sequences between, but not including, the two
       delimiting '"' characters.

    6. The token ERE represents an extended regular expression
       constant. An ERE constant shall begin with the <slash>
       character. Within an ERE constant, a <backslash> character
       shall be considered to begin an escape sequence as specified
       in the table in the Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017,
       Chapter 5, File Format Notation.  In addition, the escape
       sequences in Table 4-2, Escape Sequences in awk shall be
       recognized. The application shall ensure that a <newline> does
       not occur within an ERE constant. An ERE constant shall be
       terminated by the first unescaped occurrence of the <slash>
       character after the one that begins the ERE constant. The
       extended regular expression represented by the ERE constant
       shall be the sequence of all unescaped characters and values
       of escape sequences between, but not including, the two
       delimiting <slash> characters.

    7. A <blank> shall have no effect, except to delimit lexical
       tokens or within STRING or ERE tokens.

    8. The token NUMBER shall represent a numeric constant. Its form
       and numeric value shall either be equivalent to the decimal-
       floating-constant token as specified by the ISO C standard, or
       it shall be a sequence of decimal digits and shall be
       evaluated as an integer constant in decimal. In addition,
       implementations may accept numeric constants with the form and
       numeric value equivalent to the hexadecimal-constant and
       hexadecimal-floating-constant tokens as specified by the ISO C
       standard.

       If the value is too large or too small to be representable
       (see Section 1.1.2, Concepts Derived from the ISO C Standard),
       the behavior is undefined.

    9. A sequence of underscores, digits, and alphabetics from the
       portable character set (see the Base Definitions volume of
       POSIX.1‐2017, Section 6.1, Portable Character Set), beginning
       with an <underscore> or alphabetic character, shall be
       considered a word.

   10. The following words are keywords that shall be recognized as
       individual tokens; the name of the token is the same as the
       keyword:
       BEGIN      delete     END        function   in         printf
       break      do         exit       getline    next       return
       continue   else       for        if         print      while

   11. The following words are names of built-in functions and shall
       be recognized as the token BUILTIN_FUNC_NAME:
       atan2     gsub      log       split     sub       toupper
       close     index     match     sprintf   substr
       cos       int       rand      sqrt      system
       exp       length    sin       srand     tolower

       The above-listed keywords and names of built-in functions are
       considered reserved words.

   12. The token NAME shall consist of a word that is not a keyword
       or a name of a built-in function and is not followed
       immediately (without any delimiters) by the '(' character.

   13. The token FUNC_NAME shall consist of a word that is not a
       keyword or a name of a built-in function, followed immediately
       (without any delimiters) by the '(' character. The '('
       character shall not be included as part of the token.

   14. The following two-character sequences shall be recognized as
       the named tokens:
             ┌────────────┬──────────┬────────────┬──────────┐
             │ Token Name │ Sequence │ Token Name │ Sequence │
             ├────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼──────────┤
             │ ADD_ASSIGN │    +=    │ NO_MATCH   │    !~    │
             │ SUB_ASSIGN │    -=    │ EQ         │    ==    │
             │ MUL_ASSIGN │    *=    │ LE         │    <=    │
             │ DIV_ASSIGN │    /=    │ GE         │    >=    │
             │ MOD_ASSIGN │    %=    │ NE         │    !=    │
             │ POW_ASSIGN │    ^=    │ INCR       │    ++    │
             │ OR         │    ||    │ DECR       │    --    │
             │ AND        │    &&    │ APPEND     │    >>    │
             └────────────┴──────────┴────────────┴──────────┘

   15. The following single characters shall be recognized as tokens
       whose names are the character:

           <newline> { } ( ) [ ] , ; + - * % ^ ! > < | ? : ~ $ =

   There is a lexical ambiguity between the token ERE and the tokens
   '/' and DIV_ASSIGN.  When an input sequence begins with a <slash>
   character in any syntactic context where the token '/' or
   DIV_ASSIGN could appear as the next token in a valid program, the
   longer of those two tokens that can be recognized shall be
   recognized. In any other syntactic context where the token ERE
   could appear as the next token in a valid program, the token ERE
   shall be recognized.

EXIT STATUS

   The following exit values shall be returned:

    0    All input files were processed successfully.

   >0    An error occurred.

   The exit status can be altered within the program by using an exit
   expression.

CONSEQUENCES OF ERRORS

   If any file operand is specified and the named file cannot be
   accessed, awk shall write a diagnostic message to standard error
   and terminate without any further action.

   If the program specified by either the program operand or a
   progfile operand is not a valid awk program (as specified in the
   EXTENDED DESCRIPTION section), the behavior is undefined.

   The following sections are informative.

APPLICATION USAGE

   The index, length, match, and substr functions should not be
   confused with similar functions in the ISO C standard; the awk
   versions deal with characters, while the ISO C standard deals with
   bytes.

   Because the concatenation operation is represented by adjacent
   expressions rather than an explicit operator, it is often
   necessary to use parentheses to enforce the proper evaluation
   precedence.

   When using awk to process pathnames, it is recommended that
   LC_ALL, or at least LC_CTYPE and LC_COLLATE, are set to POSIX or C
   in the environment, since pathnames can contain byte sequences
   that do not form valid characters in some locales, in which case
   the utility's behavior would be undefined. In the POSIX locale
   each byte is a valid single-byte character, and therefore this
   problem is avoided.

   On implementations where the "==" operator checks if strings
   collate equally, applications needing to check whether strings are
   identical can use:

       length(a) == length(b) && index(a,b) == 1

   On implementations where the "==" operator checks if strings are
   identical, applications needing to check whether strings collate
   equally can use:

       a <= b && a >= b

EXAMPLES

   The awk program specified in the command line is most easily
   specified within single-quotes (for example, 'program') for
   applications using sh, because awk programs commonly contain
   characters that are special to the shell, including double-quotes.
   In the cases where an awk program contains single-quote
   characters, it is usually easiest to specify most of the program
   as strings within single-quotes concatenated by the shell with
   quoted single-quote characters. For example:

       awk '/'\''/ { print "quote:", $0 }'

   prints all lines from the standard input containing a single-quote
   character, prefixed with quote:.

   The following are examples of simple awk programs:

    1. Write to the standard output all input lines for which field 3
       is greater than 5:

           $3 > 5

    2. Write every tenth line:

           (NR % 10) == 0

    3. Write any line with a substring matching the regular
       expression:

           /(G|D)(2[0-9][[:alpha:]]*)/

    4. Print any line with a substring containing a 'G' or 'D',
       followed by a sequence of digits and characters. This example
       uses character classes digit and alpha to match language-
       independent digit and alphabetic characters respectively:

           /(G|D)([[:digit:][:alpha:]]*)/

    5. Write any line in which the second field matches the regular
       expression and the fourth field does not:

           $2 ~ /xyz/ && $4 !~ /xyz/

    6. Write any line in which the second field contains a
       <backslash>:

           $2 ~ /\\/

    7. Write any line in which the second field contains a
       <backslash>.  Note that <backslash>-escapes are interpreted
       twice; once in lexical processing of the string and once in
       processing the regular expression:

           $2 ~ "\\\\"

    8. Write the second to the last and the last field in each line.
       Separate the fields by a <colon>:

           {OFS=":";print $(NF-1), $NF}

    9. Write the line number and number of fields in each line. The
       three strings representing the line number, the <colon>, and
       the number of fields are concatenated and that string is
       written to standard output:

           {print NR ":" NF}

   10. Write lines longer than 72 characters:

           length($0) > 72

   11. Write the first two fields in opposite order separated by OFS:

           { print $2, $1 }

   12. Same, with input fields separated by a <comma> or <space> and
       <tab> characters, or both:

           BEGIN { FS = ",[ \t]*|[ \t]+" }
                 { print $2, $1 }

   13. Add up the first column, print sum, and average:

                 {s += $1 }
           END   {print "sum is ", s, " average is", s/NR}

   14. Write fields in reverse order, one per line (many lines out
       for each line in):

           { for (i = NF; i > 0; --i) print $i }

   15. Write all lines between occurrences of the strings start and
       stop:

           /start/, /stop/

   16. Write all lines whose first field is different from the
       previous one:

           $1 != prev { print; prev = $1 }

   17. Simulate echo:

           BEGIN  {
                   for (i = 1; i < ARGC; ++i)
                   printf("%s%s", ARGV[i], i==ARGC-1?"\n":" ")
           }

   18. Write the path prefixes contained in the PATH environment
       variable, one per line:

           BEGIN  {
                   n = split (ENVIRON["PATH"], path, ":")
                   for (i = 1; i <= n; ++i)
                   print path[i]
           }

   19. If there is a file named input containing page headers of the
       form: Page #

       and a file named program that contains:

           /Page/   { $2 = n++; }
                    { print }

       then the command line:

           awk -f program n=5 input

       prints the file input, filling in page numbers starting at 5.

RATIONALE

   This description is based on the new awk, ``nawk'', (see the
   referenced The AWK Programming Language), which introduced a
   number of new features to the historical awk:

    1. New keywords: delete, do, function, return

    2. New built-in functions: atan2, close, cos, gsub, match, rand,
       sin, srand, sub, system

    3. New predefined variables: FNR, ARGC, ARGV, RSTART, RLENGTH,
       SUBSEP

    4. New expression operators: ?, :, ,, ^

    5. The FS variable and the third argument to split, now treated
       as extended regular expressions.

    6. The operator precedence, changed to more closely match the C
       language.  Two examples of code that operate differently are:

           while ( n /= 10 > 1) ...
           if (!"wk" ~ /bwk/) ...

   Several features have been added based on newer implementations of
   awk:

    *  Multiple instances of -f progfile are permitted.

    *  The new option -v assignment.

    *  The new predefined variable ENVIRON.

    *  New built-in functions toupper and tolower.

    *  More formatting capabilities are added to printf to match the
       ISO C standard.

   Earlier versions of this standard required implementations to
   support multiple adjacent <semicolon>s, lines with one or more
   <semicolon> before a rule (pattern-action pairs), and lines with
   only <semicolon>(s).  These are not required by this standard and
   are considered poor programming practice, but can be accepted by
   an implementation of awk as an extension.

   The overall awk syntax has always been based on the C language,
   with a few features from the shell command language and other
   sources. Because of this, it is not completely compatible with any
   other language, which has caused confusion for some users. It is
   not the intent of the standard developers to address such issues.
   A few relatively minor changes toward making the language more
   compatible with the ISO C standard were made; most of these
   changes are based on similar changes in recent implementations, as
   described above. There remain several C-language conventions that
   are not in awk.  One of the notable ones is the <comma> operator,
   which is commonly used to specify multiple expressions in the C
   language for statement. Also, there are various places where awk
   is more restrictive than the C language regarding the type of
   expression that can be used in a given context. These limitations
   are due to the different features that the awk language does
   provide.

   Regular expressions in awk have been extended somewhat from
   historical implementations to make them a pure superset of
   extended regular expressions, as defined by POSIX.1‐2008 (see the
   Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Section 9.4, Extended
   Regular Expressions).  The main extensions are
   internationalization features and interval expressions. Historical
   implementations of awk have long supported <backslash>-escape
   sequences as an extension to extended regular expressions, and
   this extension has been retained despite inconsistency with other
   utilities. The number of escape sequences recognized in both
   extended regular expressions and strings has varied (generally
   increasing with time) among implementations. The set specified by
   POSIX.1‐2008 includes most sequences known to be supported by
   popular implementations and by the ISO C standard. One sequence
   that is not supported is hexadecimal value escapes beginning with
   '\x'.  This would allow values expressed in more than 9 bits to be
   used within awk as in the ISO C standard. However, because this
   syntax has a non-deterministic length, it does not permit the
   subsequent character to be a hexadecimal digit. This limitation
   can be dealt with in the C language by the use of lexical string
   concatenation. In the awk language, concatenation could also be a
   solution for strings, but not for extended regular expressions
   (either lexical ERE tokens or strings used dynamically as regular
   expressions). Because of this limitation, the feature has not been
   added to POSIX.1‐2008.

   When a string variable is used in a context where an extended
   regular expression normally appears (where the lexical token ERE
   is used in the grammar) the string does not contain the literal
   <slash> characters.

   Some versions of awk allow the form:

       func name(args, ... ) { statements }

   This has been deprecated by the authors of the language, who asked
   that it not be specified.

   Historical implementations of awk produce an error if a next
   statement is executed in a BEGIN action, and cause awk to
   terminate if a next statement is executed in an END action. This
   behavior has not been documented, and it was not believed that it
   was necessary to standardize it.

   The specification of conversions between string and numeric values
   is much more detailed than in the documentation of historical
   implementations or in the referenced The AWK Programming Language.
   Although most of the behavior is designed to be intuitive, the
   details are necessary to ensure compatible behavior from different
   implementations. This is especially important in relational
   expressions since the types of the operands determine whether a
   string or numeric comparison is performed. From the perspective of
   an application developer, it is usually sufficient to expect
   intuitive behavior and to force conversions (by adding zero or
   concatenating a null string) when the type of an expression does
   not obviously match what is needed. The intent has been to specify
   historical practice in almost all cases. The one exception is
   that, in historical implementations, variables and constants
   maintain both string and numeric values after their original value
   is converted by any use. This means that referencing a variable or
   constant can have unexpected side-effects. For example, with
   historical implementations the following program:

       {
           a = "+2"
           b = 2
           if (NR % 2)
               c = a + b
           if (a == b)
               print "numeric comparison"
           else
               print "string comparison"
       }

   would perform a numeric comparison (and output numeric comparison)
   for each odd-numbered line, but perform a string comparison (and
   output string comparison) for each even-numbered line.
   POSIX.1‐2008 ensures that comparisons will be numeric if
   necessary. With historical implementations, the following program:

       BEGIN {
           OFMT = "%e"
           print 3.14
           OFMT = "%f"
           print 3.14
       }

   would output "3.140000e+00" twice, because in the second print
   statement the constant "3.14" would have a string value from the
   previous conversion. POSIX.1‐2008 requires that the output of the
   second print statement be "3.140000".  The behavior of historical
   implementations was seen as too unintuitive and unpredictable.

   It was pointed out that with the rules contained in early drafts,
   the following script would print nothing:

       BEGIN {
           y[1.5] = 1
           OFMT = "%e"
           print y[1.5]
       }

   Therefore, a new variable, CONVFMT, was introduced. The OFMT
   variable is now restricted to affecting output conversions of
   numbers to strings and CONVFMT is used for internal conversions,
   such as comparisons or array indexing. The default value is the
   same as that for OFMT, so unless a program changes CONVFMT (which
   no historical program would do), it will receive the historical
   behavior associated with internal string conversions.

   The POSIX awk lexical and syntactic conventions are specified more
   formally than in other sources. Again the intent has been to
   specify historical practice. One convention that may not be
   obvious from the formal grammar as in other verbal descriptions is
   where <newline> characters are acceptable. There are several
   obvious placements such as terminating a statement, and a
   <backslash> can be used to escape <newline> characters between any
   lexical tokens. In addition, <newline> characters without
   <backslash> characters can follow a comma, an open brace, a
   logical AND operator ("&&"), a logical OR operator ("||"), the do
   keyword, the else keyword, and the closing parenthesis of an if,
   for, or while statement. For example:

       { print $1,
               $2 }

   The requirement that awk add a trailing <newline> to the program
   argument text is to simplify the grammar, making it match a text
   file in form. There is no way for an application or test suite to
   determine whether a literal <newline> is added or whether awk
   simply acts as if it did.

   POSIX.1‐2008 requires several changes from historical
   implementations in order to support internationalization. Probably
   the most subtle of these is the use of the decimal-point
   character, defined by the LC_NUMERIC category of the locale, in
   representations of floating-point numbers.  This locale-specific
   character is used in recognizing numeric input, in converting
   between strings and numeric values, and in formatting output.
   However, regardless of locale, the <period> character (the
   decimal-point character of the POSIX locale) is the decimal-point
   character recognized in processing awk programs (including
   assignments in command line arguments). This is essentially the
   same convention as the one used in the ISO C standard. The
   difference is that the C language includes the setlocale()
   function, which permits an application to modify its locale.
   Because of this capability, a C application begins executing with
   its locale set to the C locale, and only executes in the
   environment-specified locale after an explicit call to
   setlocale().  However, adding such an elaborate new feature to the
   awk language was seen as inappropriate for POSIX.1‐2008. It is
   possible to execute an awk program explicitly in any desired
   locale by setting the environment in the shell.

   The undefined behavior resulting from NULs in extended regular
   expressions allows future extensions for the GNU gawk program to
   process binary data.

   The behavior in the case of invalid awk programs (including
   lexical, syntactic, and semantic errors) is undefined because it
   was considered overly limiting on implementations to specify. In
   most cases such errors can be expected to produce a diagnostic and
   a non-zero exit status. However, some implementations may choose
   to extend the language in ways that make use of certain invalid
   constructs. Other invalid constructs might be deemed worthy of a
   warning, but otherwise cause some reasonable behavior. Still other
   constructs may be very difficult to detect in some
   implementations.  Also, different implementations might detect a
   given error during an initial parsing of the program (before
   reading any input files) while others might detect it when
   executing the program after reading some input. Implementors
   should be aware that diagnosing errors as early as possible and
   producing useful diagnostics can ease debugging of applications,
   and thus make an implementation more usable.

   The unspecified behavior from using multi-character RS values is
   to allow possible future extensions based on extended regular
   expressions used for record separators. Historical implementations
   take the first character of the string and ignore the others.

   Unspecified behavior when split(string,array,<null>) is used is to
   allow a proposed future extension that would split up a string
   into an array of individual characters.

   In the context of the getline function, equally good arguments for
   different precedences of the | and < operators can be made.
   Historical practice has been that:

       getline < "a" "b"

   is parsed as:

       ( getline < "a" ) "b"

   although many would argue that the intent was that the file ab
   should be read. However:

       getline < "x" + 1

   parses as:

       getline < ( "x" + 1 )

   Similar problems occur with the | version of getline, particularly
   in combination with $.  For example:

       $"echo hi" | getline

   (This situation is particularly problematic when used in a print
   statement, where the |getline part might be a redirection of the
   print.)

   Since in most cases such constructs are not (or at least should
   not) be used (because they have a natural ambiguity for which
   there is no conventional parsing), the meaning of these constructs
   has been made explicitly unspecified. (The effect is that a
   conforming application that runs into the problem must
   parenthesize to resolve the ambiguity.)  There appeared to be few
   if any actual uses of such constructs.

   Grammars can be written that would cause an error under these
   circumstances. Where backwards-compatibility is not a large
   consideration, implementors may wish to use such grammars.

   Some historical implementations have allowed some built-in
   functions to be called without an argument list, the result being
   a default argument list chosen in some ``reasonable'' way. Use of
   length as a synonym for length($0) is the only one of these forms
   that is thought to be widely known or widely used; this particular
   form is documented in various places (for example, most historical
   awk reference pages, although not in the referenced The AWK
   Programming Language) as legitimate practice.  With this
   exception, default argument lists have always been undocumented
   and vaguely defined, and it is not at all clear how (or if) they
   should be generalized to user-defined functions. They add no
   useful functionality and preclude possible future extensions that
   might need to name functions without calling them. Not
   standardizing them seems the simplest course. The standard
   developers considered that length merited special treatment,
   however, since it has been documented in the past and sees
   possibly substantial use in historical programs.  Accordingly,
   this usage has been made legitimate, but Issue 5 removed the
   obsolescent marking for XSI-conforming implementations and many
   otherwise conforming applications depend on this feature.

   In sub and gsub, if repl is a string literal (the lexical token
   STRING), then two consecutive <backslash> characters should be
   used in the string to ensure a single <backslash> will precede the
   <ampersand> when the resultant string is passed to the function.
   (For example, to specify one literal <ampersand> in the
   replacement string, use gsub(ERE, "\\&").)

   Historically, the only special character in the repl argument of
   sub and gsub string functions was the <ampersand> ('&') character
   and preceding it with the <backslash> character was used to turn
   off its special meaning.

   The description in the ISO POSIX‐2:1993 standard introduced
   behavior such that the <backslash> character was another special
   character and it was unspecified whether there were any other
   special characters. This description introduced several
   portability problems, some of which are described below, and so it
   has been replaced with the more historical description. Some of
   the problems include:

    *  Historically, to create the replacement string, a script could
       use gsub(ERE, "\\&"), but with the ISO POSIX‐2:1993 standard
       wording, it was necessary to use gsub(ERE, "\\\\&").  The
       <backslash> characters are doubled here because all string
       literals are subject to lexical analysis, which would reduce
       each pair of <backslash> characters to a single <backslash>
       before being passed to gsub.

    *  Since it was unspecified what the special characters were, for
       portable scripts to guarantee that characters are printed
       literally, each character had to be preceded with a
       <backslash>.  (For example, a portable script had to use
       gsub(ERE, "\\h\\i") to produce a replacement string of "hi".)

   The description for comparisons in the ISO POSIX‐2:1993 standard
   did not properly describe historical practice because of the way
   numeric strings are compared as numbers. The current rules cause
   the following code:

       if (0 == "000")
           print "strange, but true"
       else
           print "not true"

   to do a numeric comparison, causing the if to succeed. It should
   be intuitively obvious that this is incorrect behavior, and
   indeed, no historical implementation of awk actually behaves this
   way.

   To fix this problem, the definition of numeric string was enhanced
   to include only those values obtained from specific circumstances
   (mostly external sources) where it is not possible to determine
   unambiguously whether the value is intended to be a string or a
   numeric.

   Variables that are assigned to a numeric string shall also be
   treated as a numeric string. (For example, the notion of a numeric
   string can be propagated across assignments.) In comparisons, all
   variables having the uninitialized value are to be treated as a
   numeric operand evaluating to the numeric value zero.

   Uninitialized variables include all types of variables including
   scalars, array elements, and fields. The definition of an
   uninitialized value in Variables and Special Variables is
   necessary to describe the value placed on uninitialized variables
   and on fields that are valid (for example, < $NF) but have no
   characters in them and to describe how these variables are to be
   used in comparisons. A valid field, such as $1, that has no
   characters in it can be obtained from an input line of "\t\t" when
   FS='\t'.  Historically, the comparison ($1<10) was done
   numerically after evaluating $1 to the value zero.

   The phrase ``... also shall have the numeric value of the numeric
   string'' was removed from several sections of the ISO POSIX‐2:1993
   standard because is specifies an unnecessary implementation
   detail. It is not necessary for POSIX.1‐2008 to specify that these
   objects be assigned two different values.  It is only necessary to
   specify that these objects may evaluate to two different values
   depending on context.

   Historical implementations of awk did not parse hexadecimal
   integer or floating constants like "0xa" and "0xap0".  Due to an
   oversight, the 2001 through 2004 editions of this standard
   required support for hexadecimal floating constants. This was due
   to the reference to atof().  This version of the standard allows
   but does not require implementations to use atof() and includes a
   description of how floating-point numbers are recognized as an
   alternative to match historic behavior. The intent of this change
   is to allow implementations to recognize floating-point constants
   according to either the ISO/IEC 9899:1990 standard or
   ISO/IEC 9899:1999 standard, and to allow (but not require)
   implementations to recognize hexadecimal integer constants.

   Historical implementations of awk did not support floating-point
   infinities and NaNs in numeric strings; e.g., "-INF" and "NaN".
   However, implementations that use the atof() or strtod() functions
   to do the conversion picked up support for these values if they
   used a ISO/IEC 9899:1999 standard version of the function instead
   of a ISO/IEC 9899:1990 standard version. Due to an oversight, the
   2001 through 2004 editions of this standard did not allow support
   for infinities and NaNs, but in this revision support is allowed
   (but not required). This is a silent change to the behavior of awk
   programs; for example, in the POSIX locale the expression:

       ("-INF" + 0 < 0)

   formerly had the value 0 because "-INF" converted to 0, but now it
   may have the value 0 or 1.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

   A future version of this standard may require the "!=" and "=="
   operators to perform string comparisons by checking if the strings
   are identical (and not by checking if they collate equally).

SEE ALSO

   Section 1.3, Grammar Conventions, grep(1p), lex(1p), sed(1p)

   The Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter 5, File
   Format Notation, Section 6.1, Portable Character Set, Chapter 8,
   Environment Variables, Chapter 9, Regular Expressions, Section
   12.2, Utility Syntax Guidelines

   The System Interfaces volume of POSIX.1‐2017, atof(3p), exec(1p),
   isspace(3p), popen(3p), setlocale(3p), strtod(3p)

COPYRIGHT

   Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic
   form from IEEE Std 1003.1-2017, Standard for Information
   Technology -- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The
   Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, 2018 Edition, Copyright
   (C) 2018 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers,
   Inc and The Open Group.  In the event of any discrepancy between
   this version and the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard,
   the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee
   document. The original Standard can be obtained online at
   http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html .

   Any typographical or formatting errors that appear in this page
   are most likely to have been introduced during the conversion of
   the source files to man page format. To report such errors, see
   https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html .